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https://www.theage.com.au/business/comp ... 502zm.html
...more thruTigerair Australia grounded plane over botched maintenance work
15 September 2018 — 1:53pm
Budget airline Tigerair Australia grounded one of its jets for three weeks last month
after it flew back to Australia
from maintenance work in the Philippines
with serious undetected faults.
The incident has prompted parent company Virgin Australia to end
all maintenance work at the facility owned by Singapore Airlines -
which owns 20 per cent of Virgin -
and has raised questions about Tigerair's and the air safety regulator's oversight
of offshore maintenance work.
Tigerair flew one of its three Boeing 737s to Clark International Airport near the Filipino city of Angeles
on July 17 to undergo heavy maintenance work.
The jet returned to Melbourne with only crew on board two weeks later, on July 31,
and Tigerair engineers discovered
that a modification to the plane's cargo bay smoke evacuation system
had been installed incorrectly.
The work was akin to the skills of a "home handyman",
according to Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association federal secretary Steve Purvinas,
with unsecured components and wires connected to the wrong terminals.
The fault required extensive repair workfollowed by testing,
which meant the jet was sitting idle in Melbourne for three weeks
and forced the airline - which only has 15 planes - to cancel some services.
Another fault was discovered before the plane's first service flight on August 22,
when crew found a flight attendant's seatbelt was not properly bolted to the seat.
"What concerns us most is other latent defects, hidden now,
but waiting to resurface at 30,000 feet," Mr Purvinas said.
"They didn’t know about the seatbelts - what else don’t they know?"
Tigerair found out about the smoke extractor defect when it was investigating
a fault in the cockpit flight recording system,
which led engineers to discover the botched wiring.
Tigerair's two other 737s have undergone work at Singapore Airlines' Philippines facility since June,
and the Virgin Group has been using the facility for close to two years,
but that relationship has been ended after the deficient work carried out on the aircraft.
Aviation analysts and consultant Neil Hansford said
the incident raised questions about Tigerair's oversight of its offshore maintenance.
“If there was an [Tiger] engineer there, he should lose his licence," he said.
“This is the sort of stuff that would cause CASA, if it had balls,
to review the engineering approvals of the airline.”
The SIAEP facility was due to be audited by CASA this year,
and the authority has conducted three on-site audits there since 2014, she said.
But Mr Purvinas, from the engineers' union,
said CASA had recently moved to a new system that used a computer algorithm
to determine when a provider should be audited,
which had resulted in fewer checks.
In 2011, before Virgin bought the airline from its Singaporean owners,
CASA grounded the entire Tiger Airways fleet
for more then five weeks over lax safety standards.
The Virgin Group has been loss-making for six consecutive years
and its Tigerair division has been particularly challenged,
running at a $24 million loss last year.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/comp ... 502zm.html
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/artic ... on-451935/
17 September, 2018
Tigerair Australia has stopped sending aircraft for heavy maintenance
at SIA Engineering Philippines after a Boeing 737-800 was grounded
for just over three weeks following a heavy check at the MRO operator's Clark facility.
The aircraft, registered VH-VUB,
developed a cockpit voice recorder fault after departing on its ferry flight back to Melbourne on 31 July.
As there were no safety concerns, the aircraft continued on its nonstop ferry flight and landed safely,
a source tells FlightGlobal.
As engineers were resolving the cockpit voice recorder issue,
they discovered a defect in the cargo smoke evacuation system,
which caused the aircraft to be grounded.
Tigerair Australia and Virgin Tech conducted a full review of all maintenance items from the heavy check,
while rectifying the smoke system fault.
The aircraft re-entered service on 22 August.
Tigerair Australia has used SIAEP for heavy maintenance on both types for two years,
but has not said where it will conduct heavy checks on its fleet after dropping the provider.
Heavy maintenance on Virgin Australia’s 737s is conducted by
Air New Zealand Engineering & Maintenance in Christchurch.
SIAEP is a joint venture between SIA Engineering Company and Cebu Pacific Air.
FlightGlobal Dashboard data shows that its other clients include Philippines AirAsia,
Scoot and SilkAir.