Tiger Airways
MANY passengers have been caught unawares by the grounding of Tiger Airways, turning up at airports to find their flights have been cancelled.
The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has suspended all Tiger Airways Australia domestic flights with immediate effect from today.
Many passengers hadn’t heard when they arrived at airports this morning.
One woman said she was “unimpressed” to find her flight cancelled at Sydney airport.
“I mean, the airline may as well just close down,” she told TV crews.
“This is just pathetic.
“You get here and then, ‘They’re banned, sorry no flights’.”
The woman said safety had to come first, but the grounding should have been better publicised.
Another woman said she drove for an hour to get to the airport before hearing there would be no flight.
“(I’m) just not happy, this is our holiday, they don’t even call us to say you’re not flying.”
It’s understood Tiger did manage to alert some passengers via text messages this morning.
Tiger has told customers booked to travel with it in the next week not to bother going to an airport and that they will be offered a full refund or a credit for deferred travel.
With the grounding coinciding with the start of school holidays in NSW and Victoria, travellers are now scrambling to get on flights with other airlines.
AAP reporter Belinda Merhab, who flew with Tiger from Melbourne to Sydney yesterday morning, said she jumped on the internet to book a new return flight with Virgin.
“The flight I got back cost me more than the whole return trip I got with Tiger,” she said.
Ms Merhab said she’d flown with Tiger about 20 times without incident but probably wouldn’t fly with them again.
Pilots flying too low
The action followed the regulator issuing the airline with a show cause notice in March, and two recent incidents where pilots have twice flown into Melbourne airports below the lowest safe altitude.
The most recent incident occurred on Thursday night when a Tiger Airways Airbus A320 flew into Avalon airport below the lowest safe altitude.
CASA says taking Tiger’s response into account, it’s imposed a number of conditions on the airline’s air operator’s certificate.
They include actions to improve the proficiency of Tiger’s pilots and their training and checking processes, changes to fatigue management and improvements to maintenance control.
Tiger says its domestic services will remain suspended until next Saturday while it conducts investigations into two recent operational incidents.
It says its services to and from Singapore are not affected and continue to operate normally.
The airline says it is doing all it can to minimise passenger disruption, but customers with bookings in Australia should not travel to the airport and will be offered a full refund or credit for deferred travel.
The Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA) said the grounding should prompt the industry and the Federal Government to get moving on recommendations last week from a Senate inquiry into pilot training and airline safety.
“There has been concern for some time about dropping safety standards in Australian aviation due to the pressures introduced by some low-cost carriers,” AIPA president Barry Jackson said.
Captain Jackson said the AIPA had been pushing hard for reform, but the Senate inquiry’s proposals to strengthen aviation safety had been met with indifference and denial by management in sections of the industry.
The Senate inquiry’s recommendations, handed down last week, included a minimum of 1500 hours’ flight experience for commercial pilots as well as that qualification to the highest standard of an airline pilot licence be a hiring prerequisite.
source: http://www.news.com.au
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