Tiger Flight Cancellation In Tasmania
 

Looks like an interesting issue over the weekend.

Federal police guard Tiger Airlines staff after passengers told they would be stranded in Hobart for three days

I can understand an overnight delay whereby a LCC airline could not have 'spare' aircraft or staff available, however a 3-day delay?!?
How?:confused:

Simple, don't fly them.

HBA-MEL is one of the fastest growing routes in Australia, and has fewer available seats than at the corresponding time last year. Hence load factors are very high. So it then takes 3 or 4 days to find 180 spare seats to put people on.

It would be good to hear what Tiger has to say about this incident. Though from the article below I wonder why they couldn't send another crew person down, even on another airline.

However, hypothetically speaking of course, after 24 hours (or preferably much less) any airline should either find an aircraft somewhere in their fleet, or put you on another airline, even if they have to charter another airline's aircraft.

You get what you pay for.

Tiger has terminators in MEL every night, surely they could have sent one down to HBA & just delayed the flight by a few hours - there's no curfew issues.

Every airline has Mid Duty Sickness - I've never seen another domestic airline have to delay a flight by 3 days due to one though!! They either fly in a crew member or cancel the flight & reaccomidate on the same or next day.

Personaly I have never ever agreed with that "you get what you pay for" saying. That is simply wrong.

Just because you pay a lower price for something, does not in any way whatsoever imply you should get a faulty item. It may not be as shiny, taste as good or last as long, but you should always get something fit for purpose.

In this case these passengers bought a ticket to fly on a particular flight. Now yes there are many reasons why a flight may be delayed or cancelled, and the only story out so far indicates this was a safety of flight regulation issue. But apparently not one of these passengers got what they paid for.

If the whole story is true (there's a first time for everything) then the way these people were treated shows exactly what Tiger thinks of the traveling Australian public.

I'd like to hear Tiger's side of this first, but it does sound rather indefensible at this stage. It's just a shame we're so willing to keep giving patheic service a second chance in any industry.

Why do they bring it upon themselves??
 

What I just dont get is WHY they do this when they have to know the terrible publicity that awaits.

Journo's just feast on this stuff whether its deserved or not (in this case it pains me to say it IS deserved)......

The folk running Tiger need a large dose of commercial reality check pills!!!

Again, what on earth were Tiger management thinking???

Time Mr Davis had a first hand look methinks!! If not.......then they will wallow in the mire they have created for themselves......c'mon, as suggested by others above, there WERE OPTIONS it seems.

Shhhhheeeeeeshh!!!

This is the danger when people fly with an airline that only has limited numbers of service per day on the route and they don't offload pax to other carriers.

One has to ponder whether it was worthwhile to pay the pax to fly on other carriers (to make sure they get to their destination on time) instead of gambling on the risks of having the pax put up with the inconvenience while at the same time having the media beat up the story and creating negative publicity across Australia.

I'm very sure that this airline works on the theory that 'any publicity is good publicity'.

Ryanair also works on the any publicity is good publicity theory.

But seriously what the hell happened here? Did the aircraft end up flying to Melbourne empty because of the sick crew member or did it stay? If it stayed there is no reason why the whole plane load of people couldn't have been taken the next day. If it flew empty then I can understand the delay, but yet again Tiger could and should have handled the situtation much better.

The show they run on Channel 7 is testament to this.

Tigers entry to Aus is almost as bad as Jetstar's is into NZ :D

I wonder if Tiger's performance will eventually cause the government to introduce laws forcing carriers to treat pax better.

For me a 6 hour delay should automatically trigger meals, accommodation and transfer onto the first available flight on any carrier.

Yes, it'll be met by cries of increased costs but at some point there has to be protection for the customer. Telling customers they have a 3 day delay is just being ridiculous.

Like all airlines Tiger would have operated a reduced scheduale on Saturday, so there is no reason they could not have handled this better, even ops the aircraft with max pax for the cabin crew on board and overnighted the remining pax and put them on other carriers the following day, a three day delay is just a joke.

^
Exactly. As I said earlier, I can understand, this incident would cause an overnight delay. However for it to last more then 24 hours is dumbfounding.
Why couldn't Tiger look up their scheduled passenger numbers for the following days flights (eg. on their MEL-SYD route) and pick the flight which had the least number of passengers and cancel that flight.
Use the aircraft and crew off the cancelled flight and take it to Hobart.
Crew hours wouldn't be an issue as Melbourne - Hobart is less then MEL-SYD.

The fact that there is not an industry wide 'back up plan' for these sorts of delays on the low cost carriers is a problem.

Any income Tiger would have made on this flight (at the time of cancellation) should have been put to paying the other airlines a form of compensation to take the stranded passengers to their destination.

Surprise Surprise
 

Does not surprise me with Tiger Airways at all. My sister flew with them earlier this year Melbourne-Sydney-Melbourne and coming up was fine, except going back was terrible. Plane was delayed 1.5 hours with no reason given at all, which meant when she arrived into Tullamarine she missed the shuttle to Moorabbin. She then had to get the skybus (the shuttle had already been paid for) into Southern Cross and get a taxi from there. Meant instead of getting home at a civilised hour she did not get home till 1.30am. She swears she will not fly with them again.

Tiger terminal in Melbourne is so far away from the main one:rolleyes::rolleyes:

I am led to believe that the problem was greater than HBA-MEL as MEL-SYD flights were also cancelled and there a lot of people stranded in Melbourne on Sunday night as well. A shortage of staff or aircraft??

Cheers
M

From a technical perspective what is the min number of crew Tiger could have flown with while having some PAX in the cabin? Is it based on number of seats or number of PAX?

Broadly speaking, in Australia the min number of cabin crew is based on the number of pax (1 cabin crew for 36 pax), HOWEVER...

Each aircraft will also have a minimum number of cabin crew, determined by CASA, taking into account the cabin and exit configuration. For a 320 to carry ONE pax it must have FOUR cabin crew. To carry 180 pax (max pax in both Tiger config and what the aircraft is certified to carry) it would need five cabin crew (5*36=180) or 144 with four cabin crew(4*36=144), in keeping with the 1:36 ratio. However, CASA have given a dispensation to Tiger (and separately, Jetstar) to operate their 320s at max pax with four cabin crew.

This means that when one cabin crew goes sick into a remote port the airlines start to run into trouble.

That aircraft could not have left HBA with passengers without an extra cabin crew member to make up the minimum - four.

Exactly as said above, this is not america, TT can not fly back with any pax unless they had a minimum of 4 Crew. Sure, so they after they got back to Melbourne they could have sent out a new crew (1% chance of finding new crew), but thats two empty sectors, and not a hope in hell Tiger Management would want to throw away that much cash, so they went for the cheaper option. Propping pax up.

And for those who know, there was hardly any of them who had to wait 3 days. Seing its a Saturday, plenty of affordable fares still sitting there if they really want to get home on all carriers. Some people just push it that little bit extra and get the attention and cry like Babies.

Because they were all full and the Sydney weather forced the cancellation of more flights the evening before than HBA, so they needed to get those morning yssy runs done. Current schedules cannot really take any mega delays, due to flights operating close to OOL, SYD curfews which take up the majority of the flying.

Tiger dosn't have a reduced schedule on a Sat. There are morning Perth runs which take the heat of the extra frequency routes that are reduced.

If there was no curfew in SYD they would not have all these problems when the weather turns ugly.

Welcome to the world of LCCs. 1.5hr delay is nothing these days.

Here's an idea
 

Even LCCs should be smart enough to pick a few ports where a crew of 5 would be good insurance against the consequences of a single crew member getting ill in a port where crew cannot be easily replaced.

Philip - it's not quite that easy, pairings are build based on roster efficency/schedule and then aircraft are cycled by maintenance scheduling requirements - to match changing crew numbers depending on destinations would be very messy.

It would also mean having different procedures for in Tiger's case 4 & 5 crew operation which would have to be added to relevent manuals & approved by the relevent regulators.

What operators do is a risk assessment based on the potential for things like this to occur and then balance against whether it's cheaper to have extra crew (say on reserve in that base) or to fly crew in or to cancel & reaccomidate.

Normally you'd fly in a crew member from one of your hubs on your or a different carrier and then operate the flight delayed. You could also potentially have crew outside of a rest period in a hotel ready to operate a later flight (although not really a option for Tiger).

Worst case scenario (which can sometimes be best case to limit delays) you cancel the flight & transfer pax to later flights & other carriers.

Some airlines have very small bases outside of hub ports to cover for situations such as this however it's naturally not viable at every port.

HBA would be a relatively low risk for any airline as it's so close to MEL where airlines all have hub bases & has high frequency of flights from 3 airlines - Lukas's comment of a 1% chance of finding crew is very strange - airlines normally operate a certain (significent) percentage of crew on reserve coverage so either Tiger is operating very, very lean or their reserve coverage finishes before this situation occured.

The further comment of a 1.5 hour delay is "nothing these days" is certainly not accurate -that would be a very significent delay that would cost tens of thoasands of dollars (and potentially a lot more) and would certainly be avoided unless absolutely necessary. A 1.5 hour delay could potentially cause disruption for 2 days on that aircraft cycle if it couldn't be isolated & terminated into a non curfew port.

Other airlines have very structured procedures to deal with situations like this with plans in place & are willing to transfer pax to competitors to get them away - given Tiger's very low cost base they may not have the same capacity and planning in the background to deal with what for them given their small size would still be unusual occurances. For the other 3 airlines mid duty/upline sicknesses occur network wide multiple times daily.

This would have to be the dumbest comment I have read for a long time.

Does this mean that If I pay for a Pizza Hut pizza to be delivered, that I should suck it up and order KFC if it doesnt arrive? If I buy a commodore and it breaks down within 2 hours of collection, then i should suck it up and buy a ford straight away? Pre - pay a taxi to get you home late one night, and he drops you round the corner, maybe you should walk????You got to be kidding me.

If your statement is true regarding seats on other airlines, why didnt Tiger buy those seats and put those pax on it? Surely it would have been cheaper than the compensation that they now will be paying, not to mention the bad press? Make a bad situation good?

I have abolutely no issue with the fact that TT could not fly with the number of cabin crew, and am human enough to expect that issues like this do occur. As someone mentioned above there are CASA requirments that must be met, and that is for safetyt reasons which I fully accept. However I would expect additional efforts are made to get pax to their desination as soon as practical. "Offer a refund"?, thats useful when you have to spend money on accommodation and taxis.

Lukas, you're living a Tiger 'pipe dream', affordable fares the next day.... yet everyone knows all carriers are hard pressed in and out of Tasmania at the moment due to all flights being very heavy loads so where are you getting these 'affordable' fares from???

Approximately 150-200 dollars per minute delayed

Qantas operate the 737-400 with minimum crew to outports (some VERY remote!) all the time, though it was far more common in recent years gone by (HBA, LST, OOL, MKY, MCY, TSV, HTI, GOV (charter), ISA, GYL (charter), BME, KTA, PHE, KGI, ASP, AYQ, CNS, ADL and the list goes on and on. For that matter, Qantas also operates the leased BA 767s min crew on every flight (except short dinner services). They still go to DRW, CNS, ADL, HBA (last summer) and CBR.

It is one of those things. The number of times a flight attendant goes sick is miniscule in the grand scheme of things - in nine years only twice has a colleague been offloaded at an outport. Using your logic would we see three-person tech crews onboard a flight to an outport!?

"My logic" is simply to do a risk/cost/benefit test and to choose ports where the cost in $, lost goodwill and bad press of a 3 day delay justifies the spare crew member. If what you're saying is that on that analysis no port would qualify then so be it. :)

Any airline where the above rated highly would do very well in Australia!

Tiger Airways is a disgrace... I will say no more.

Settle down cowboy!

I'm a Virgin FF with in excess of 500,000 points, but I thought would see what all the fuss was about.

I flew down on Wednesday (VH-VNC) TT663 and returned on Thursday afternoon (VH-VNB) TT684.

Both flights departed on time and arrived on time.

Flight down was $28.00 + $6.00 credit card fee (still $50+ cheaper than DJ, JQ or QF).

Flight back was $10.00 more, I opted to purchase luggage allowance because I was returning from a conference and knew I would be bringing back giveaways.

The only problems at check-in were from those people who have not got the slightest idea about how to read and more importantly Terms and Conditions.

Would I fly with Tiger again? YES.

At the end of the day, for me it was a business trip, it saved my company money and I got to fly on a new carrier without any hassles.

Steve S, I hope you have flown with Tiger, if so then your opinion is that. yours.

If not then, I suggest you try them out before making such comments....and I do not work for the anyone in the airline industry, my next trip is to AKL in 3 weeks with EK on an A380, why, because they were the cheapest on the days I needed to travel!

I think we all know that Tiger is cheap so statements saying how good the flights were when things go well are "old news"

The ongoing problem with Tiger is when something goes wrong, they do nothing to fix the problem.

For that reason alone I have never flown them and never will.

Same here i want to get to my destination within a reasonable timeframe.Do not have the time to be worried that i might be late for a meeting or an exhibition.

Gareth - i take it Virgin operate the 737 - 800 with similar dispensation from CASA given 4 cabin crew and 180 seats.

As a very regular Mel - Syd flier i would add that for a variety of reasons delays and cancellations seem to be common and i would not agree that other airlines procedures work as often - excuse the pun but when delay and cancellations occur the wheels fall off and the best laid plans and information for passengers goes out the window. Main problem for Tiger when these things happen is small fleet and small staff numbers makes a delay for pax much longer than QF or DJ.

I have to add i have not flown Tiger as the 45 minute check in cut off would mean getting up too early so stick with DJ and webcheck so we can arrive at just before 7 for the 7:15. Plus if it is that important (ie travelling for work) why risk a cheap fare as the delay costs you more in lost time.