The grounding of Tiger Airways’ Australian operations looks set to continue another week due to problems with documentation the airline supplied to CASA.
“The main outstanding issues relate to documentation,” CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said on August 5. “When we served proposed conditions on to Tiger, we said, these are the things you’re going to need to do to be able to address the safety problems in the airline. We now need documentation to show us how you’re going to do that, before you go flying, and how you will continue to do that once you get operational again, if we can make that decision. And we’ve been reviewing that documentation. We’ve found problems in it, and said to Tiger they’ve got to go back and fix those up.”
Those issues with documentation saw the federal court hearing into extending Tiger’s grounding delayed yet again, from August 5 to August 11.
“Tiger Airways Australia continues to work constructively with CASA and the two parties are in ongoing discussions to resolve the issues,” the airline said in a statement. “There is no information available yet as to when Tiger Airways Australia may resume services, but the airline is committed to doing so as soon as possible.
“Tiger Airways flights will, by virtue of the adjournment today, remain suspended until 11 August 2011.”
Gibson explained in a radio interview CASA’s particular concerns lay with “the control and management of all this big suite of documentation, which is quite complex. It is very important to safety, because it literally tells the airline, the people working in the airline, how they’re going to do things safely. It gives us the confidence that safety will be maintained, if and when they’re back operating, and that’s where we’ve found a problem.”
