Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Fly Again

It turns out that you can't. 

Fake "Certified" Engine Parts

have been going into one of the most popular commercial aircraft engines for years... Alert engineers in Portugal spotted a part that had suspiciously - no, impossibly - high wear soon after it had been installed in the engine, and that started an investigation that pointed the finger at AOG Technics Ltd in the UK. 

Turns out that buying reconditioned parts, "rebirthing" them with fake documentation claiming them to be new, and having a non-existent faked Quality Assurance Manager "sign off" on the quality of the parts can net almost obscene profits for an ex-Venezuelan ex-DJ ex-real-estate-agent UK immigrant. 

Effect Ripple

There are over 20,000 in commercial aircraft around the world. The scam's been going for years (they don't say how many, but claim he started somewhere between 2010 and - roughly, going by the article - 2016) and in that time it's not known exactly how many rebirthed "certified new" parts of all kinds Zamora started selling but in the year between 2019 and 2020 the company's profits experienced a huge rise, so make up your own mind. 

To my mind that's four years - that we can take a stab guess at - that possibly dodgy, quality-unknown parts were sent out into airline / aircraft maintenance organisations worldwide. There are usually spare engines (and airframe / landing gear / control susbsytem components) on the ground undergoing a rebuild, and depending on what Zamora's AOG company sold over that timeframe and what parts were actually uncertified and therefore fake, that's a lot of aircraft systems and quite a few aircraft flying potentially unsafe hardware.

And in fact, in the last few years there have been some aircraft incidents (that you can find by browsing Mentour Pilot and Mentour Now, among many many flight incident channels on Youtube) that - if a traceable link can be established back to AOG - would be attributable to Zamora personally as it appears from the Bloomberg article I used as a source that many - if not all - of his key employees may have been fake personas that don't actually exist. 

What Does That Mean?

Well, for a start, it means that any Boeing 737 aircraft that are equipped with the CFM56 engines that have been refurbished, maintained, or repaired in the last five years - and potentially, depending how far the fraud has been perpetrated - are definitely no longer as safe as they should be. Depending on how many other non-genuinely-new parts for any other subsystems AOG has sold since it was operated, there could be many other types of aircraft, many other subsystems affected. It turns one of the safest forms of transportation into something less safe. 

And What Does THAT Mean?

It means that the actions of one dishonest man can affect the lives of tens of thousands of passengers per day around the entire planet. 

Also To Be Noted

Aircraft maintenance organisations (be they independent repair hangars or self-operated maintenance hangars) are generally quite careful that the parts they use are certified as genuinely new or genuinely refurbished when they buy them. They have to accept that a supplier furnishes genuine certifications, although in many cases they "keep the bastards honest" by going to the suppliers of their suppliers to ensure they can get two levels of certification. 

They're now talking about "three levels of certification" and that's all positive. That means two levels below their current suppliers will get investigated by Purchasing managers and officers. It still won't spot the case where all three levels fake their documentation but it'll certainly help make things more difficult for dishonest suppliers.

The aircraft themselves that may have been affected will be easy to spot - once a part gets into the internal documentation system of a maintenance organisation they can track each part to the point where it entered their organisation's paperwork. So those aircraft will be rectified quite quickly, and I reckon that with luck not quite as many aircraft are affected as it at first seems. 

So in a few months all of the most critical systems will be rectified or proven by inspection, and the non-critical systems will also be rectified or inspected quickly. But it's worth keeping at the back of your mind if you travel. 

Epilogue:

As the Bloomberg article has pointed out, the aircraft industry has become the safe industry it is today because of quite deep trust relationships. At one stage not so long ago, if an aircraft engineer signed off as safe a system that subsequently failed and was found by the relevant air safety organisation to be the cause of an aircraft incident causing loss of lives, the death penalty was still an option. 

It was that tight. 

The licensed engineer had provably passed all his certifications for the specific type of system they signed their name to. It was taken on trust that the training facility / school / organisation would not certify that engineer unless they were satisfied the engineer was indeed competent in all aspects of that subsystem. 

The engineer in their turn would be quite satisfied that their Quality Assurance department had provided only components that were of suitable quality and fit for purpose, they in turn would rely on their suppliers being honest and reliable, and so forth. Checks and balances ran both ways through that system, but because of the number of lives that depended on an aircraft (and the bloody-minded glee with which aircraft accidents are reported) everyone had a stake in keeping things above board. After all, if people lost faith in air travel, business would decline for everyone involved.

There have been a few "con-artist" incidents involving improperly conducted inspections or repairs, very few of fraudulent or faulty parts, and in almost all cases those incidents have been remedied without serious incident. And you can see why - with the amounts of sensational news coverage 

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