Pollyana

Hope no-one was booked to fly domestic with Tiger in the near future......

THE Civil Aviation Safety Authority has suspended all Tiger Airways Australia domestic flights with immediate effect from Saturday.
CASA says the action has been taken because it believes permitting the airline to continue to fly poses a serious and imminent risk to air safety.

The suspension of Tiger Airways Australia follows the issue of a show cause notice to the airline in March this year, and CASA says taking Tiger's response into account it's imposed a number of conditions on the airline's air operator's certificate.

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.

chris955

We are flying with them down to Melbourne in 2 weeks.....possibly

Pollyana

Or possibly not. Definitely groundsd till next weekend

Qantas engineers have called off their strike partly as a result of the grounding....
http://www.skynews.com.au/topstories...id=633013&vId=

Trevski

They should ground Quantas with all their bad maintenance record and whats been going on with them in the last few weeks

Dorothy

Or maybe even QANTAS!

Trevski

"Whoops"

jad n rich

I was flying to melb with tiger a lot. Thought this was coming, there seemed to be a big push on to get rid of them.

If safety was the genuine reason, why wasn't Qantas grounded

End of cheap flights no doubt. $49 buck airfares to melby will be history now

Pollyana

Exactly. Love to know whats behind it really. Even CASA aren't stupid, and if they had safety concerns with Qantas they would've grounded them.

fish.01

http://au.totaltravel.yahoo.com/expe...src=y7homepage

DownUnderPaddy

I would suggest it is because Qantas does not attempt to bury any of its issues.

hoofie2002

I'm not particular fan of Qantas but their recent issues have been due to random events and failures that can still happen with regular maintenance. The age of some of the aircraft in their fleet [747, 767s] means that things will eventually fail more often despite maintenance. The A380 incident was caused by a manufacturing defect in a engine.

There may be a hell of an argument between Qantas and it's staff at the moment but the engineers and pilots are still of the highest calibre and will have no qualms about refusing to release or fly an aircraft.

HOWEVER - Qantas had a 747 that lost all electrical power and was on batteries until landing at Bangkok. That failure was directly caused my improper maintenance of something as simple as a drip tray - proving even they are not immune.

I'd still fly Qantas over any other Australian Airline purely for safety reasons [but their service before or after you get on the plane still sucks].

Amazulu

What a ridiculous statement. Who made a 'big push' to 'get rid of them'? CASA would not have taken the decision to ground an airline lightly - they must have genuine safety concerns. If those $49 fares come at the expense of safety, then what's the point?

The aviation industry is one that has been shown time and time again that when corners are cut, things ignored, swept under the carpet, then it always ends in tragedy - DC10, Alaska Airlines, Garuda, Valujet etc.

hoofie2002

Spot on Amazulu. The only constant is gravity whose sole purpose is to hammer an aircraft into the ground at high speed - something the soft, squishy things inside don't react well to.

DownUnderPaddy

Agreed 100%. CASA does not ground an entire airline unless it has been working up to it for quite some time as a result of ongoing and systemic issues with that airline.

Air travellers tend to review carriers based on baggage handling, check-in, inflight meals and leg space and all of the other trivial and surface issues.
They have NO IDEA what goes on behind the scenes and in relation to the serious meat of the processes and procedures that are required to keep planes in the air and with the minimum of fatalities.

Thankfully, CASA do.

CASA has "primary responsibility for the maintenance, enhancement and promotion of the safety of civil aviation in Australia".

I am very glad they have stepped in here and enforced that mandate.
Good on them.

jad n rich

I did not say Tiger shouldn't be investigated

However after being involved in 2 incidents - one major, with Qantas IMO I feel it is fair to question why they were not treated in the same way.

My flight with them in 2008 was the only flight I have ever been on where I wondered if I die. Maybe that changes your opinion.

The QLD media have a had a field day with Tiger, long before any investigation, in particular the SC/Brisbane to melb route, one I have travelled on over 30 times - without incident, apart from 3 X delay of over one hour.

Forum - different opinions