The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) announced today that it will be seeking to extend the suspension of Tiger Airways, which was originally to end this Saturday until the end of the month.  CASA suspended Tiger’s operating license last week over a number of safety breaches by the airline – the one that finally triggered CASA’s action was when a Tiger A320 from Sydney approached Avalon Airport, near Geelong, below the minimum safe altitude as it was coming in to land.  It was the second time in a month that a Tiger flight had dropped below the minimum safe altitude on an approach to an airport. The first incident occurred when a flight from Brisbane approached Melbourne Airport on June 7.

The action also follows CASA issuing Tiger a "show cause" notice on the airline in March following concerns about safety and maintenance procedures.

Each day of grounding cancels 60 flights, affecting about 9000 passengers a day.

Not only are Tiger in trouble with CASA, but also the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over misleading and deceptive conduct, arising out of them continuing to sell tickets for future flights, without warning customers that the flights they were selling tickets for may in fact not happen because of the suspension of operations.  After repeated warnings from the ACCC and state consumer regulators, Tiger finally stopped ticket sales yesterday.

It’s hard to imagine Tiger getting back into business after this.  Safety concerns this serious must spell the death knell for an airline.  Tiger is already a cheap, no frills airline, and there have been many reports about their poor customer service.  So with no service, and doubtful safety, they have price left – and given they are already cheap, what are they going to do?  Pay people to fly on them?

A fight between 2 airline passengers over the reclining of a seat resulted in a United Airlines flight turning back and making an emergency landing in Washington SC, with 2 F16 fighter jets to escort it there.

The fight began not long after take-off when a passenger reclined his seat and a passenger behind him objected.  The pair were separated by a flight attendant and another passenger tried to separate the fighting pair.

On landing, the fighters were taken into police custody, and later released without charges being pressed.

Now, having the passenger in front of me reclining their seat into me is one of my bugbears about flying.  I’m tall, and economy isn’t that much fun for me (oh for the good old days when I could fly business class – before the company went all cheap on us), but when the seats are upright, I can get into a vaguely comfortable position.  However, when the person in front reclines their seat, crunch, there goes my knees, and any capacity to use the entertainment system.

Now, it is not beyond me on occasion to plant my knees hard into the back of the seat in front just to let the other person know I’m there.  And flying back from Singapore earlier this year, I got a dirty look from an attendant for dropping the f-bomb a bit louder than I meant when I was crunched (hey I was tired, listening to my ipod and sort of daydreaming when it happened).

But getting into a fight about it is a bit over the top!