The Flying Tiger…
Posted on November 3rd, 2010 by TWS
Oh god. I had to fly Tiger the other day. Actually, I didn’t really have to. I chose to.
Why, I’m not quite sure. Well, for a start, the one-way fare was only $68 bucks. Less than the cost of a cab fare. So I thought I would do the right thing by the client and fly to SYD-MEL the cheapest way.
And let’s face it, the flight is only an hour and I have done this route more times than I care to remember. So what was the worst that could possibly happen? Right.
Tiger approach boarding their planes the same way I approach my parenting responsibilities on a Friday night when there’s a football game on TV. I basically say to the kids, “look, eat what you want, go to sleep when you want, just don’t annoy me for the next 3-hours”. Or something like that.
When you make the original booking online, Tiger make it clear that they can’t afford check-in staff (ie print your own boarding pass or cough up $20 if you want us to do it at the airport), don’t really want to pay some poor prick to throw your bags in the hold and even by their own admission – say that seats will be allocated whenever the hell the IT system in India come back from lunch and work out the bugs in the system.
I think the message I received was after several pushy attempts to sell me window seats, exit-row seats, aisle seats and seats towards the front, the system basically said “well screw you, good luck with getting a seat you like” and promptly allocated me a seat near the back door.
Tiger must have stolen the “how to load an Airbus manual without human intervention” from Virgin. Like sheep, you are asked to load by both the front door and the rear stairs. If only most of the passengers understood english.
As soon as the poor, lone gate agent (who looked all of 21 and like he needed a good feed) picked up the mic to announce that boarding would begin in 5-minutes, people literally started to stampede the joint. It was mayhem.
Even though I was in row 21, (courtesy of my online stoush with their booking engine), I was supposed to enter via the back door but when I saw a group of people head down the stairs and out onto the tarmac, never to be seen of or heard of again, I decided against it.
The interior was decidedly average. Looked like they held a bucks party in it about an hour ago.
Fortunately, I was allocated an aisle seat, but it made no real difference as the thing was packed to the rafters. There was a young guy right beside me and a weird looking chick in the window seat.
As we started to push back, the guy beside me started fiddling with his seat belt and starting rubbing his hands on his pants. I started to shift in my seat uneasily and prayed to god that this wasn’t some young mating ritual the guy was performing to impress the female beside him.
I casually leaned over and politely said, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing????”
“I’ve never been on a plane before and don’t know how to put this on”, he muttered, as he clutched the seat-belt clumsily.
“You’re kidding, right?” I was dumbfounded.
But he wasn’t.
That was a first for me. I don’t think I can remember ever getting on a plane where the person beside me didn’t know how to fasten a seat belt. And I’ve flown out of some pretty “basic” airports. Even people in Michigan (where my wife’s family are from) know how to do a seat belt up. But I digress.
The trolley dolleys hoofed up and down the aisles, peddling $5 Nescafe coffee, $7 VB cans and whatever other over-priced crap they can get away with. Standard Operating Procedure on a LCC. On the whole, the flight is un-eventful and everyone is relatively well behaved.
We then come into land to MEL. Tiger’s “arrivals” hall is to the left of the main airport terminal. Looks like a big shed and it’s where all the LCC start (and finish). I think our pilot must have been new because when we landed, he drove around the airfield for 10-minutes looking for a suitable place to park.
We eventually come to rest somewhere near the outskirts of the airport. The doors fly open, and we are told to grab our stuff and piss-off. Or something like this.
They crew fail to tell is that we would be exiting the plane via mobile stairs so a lot of people who don’t fly often stood at the top and waited for something to happen, unsure as of what to do next. To make matters worse, there was a torrential amount of rain.
As the sheep effect kicked in and people cautiously started following each other, we headed for the “terminal”. The walk seemed to take forever. There we no signs, no orange cones up around the plane, no warnings that said “hey, don’t walk in front of this bit here unless you want to get sucked into a spinning turbine”. Nothing like that.
In fact, I think I even saw a Dad kicking the footy with his 2 boys in front of the left engine. Kidding. The father was no-where to be seen.
The baggage belt was a joke. There was a single conveyer belt sitting all alone in a tiny make-shift shed. I kid you not. That was it. You basically prayed like hell your bag made it, and after you put all your clothes and undies back inside, and having people make fun of you while you did it, there is a turnstile type gate and that’s it, you’re out into the cheap seats of the airport terminal.
So that was my experience on Tiger. We got from point A to point B without flying into the side of a mountain. And that’s all you can expect when the cost of the fare was cheaper than the cost of the taxi ride. Would I do it again? Probably, but this time I’ll take my camera.
