Tiger Flight Cancellation In Tasmania

[Lukas M]

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.

Telling customers they have a 3 day delay is just being ridiculous.

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.

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.

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.

Like all airlines Tiger would have operated a reduced scheduale on Saturday

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.

A shortage of staff or aircraft??

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

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.

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

[Philip Argy]

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.

[Adam G]

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.

[Adrian B]

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

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.

[Marty H]

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???

[D Chan]

Originally Posted by Adam G

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)

Approximately 150-200 dollars per minute delayed

[Gareth U]

Originally Posted by Philip Argy

Even LCCs should be smart enough to pick a few ports where a crew of 5 would be good insurance...

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!?

[Philip Argy]

Originally Posted by Gareth U

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.

[Gareth U]

Originally Posted by Philip Argy

lost goodwill

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

[Steve S... 2]

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