After a lot of hibernating during covid, I've done a fair number of plane trips this year.
Long Island (JFK). Tucson. Ireland. Chicago. Long Island (JFK). Portland OR (trip to the state of Washington). NYC. Washington DC.
Flying Jet Blue, American, and Aer Lingus.
And for all the time I've spent in he air, I can honestly say I didn't spend a nano-second worrying about whether the plane was going to fall apart. That's because, for all their flaws, airlines actually have pretty good safety records. Especially the airlines you've heard of - like Jet Blue, American, and (if you're me, and you've made quite a few trips to Ireland) Aer Lingus.
On a metaphorically fly-by-night airline I might think twice.
A week or so later I was on a red-eye from the West Coast back to Boston. A United flight. Somewhere along the line, the pilot got on to thank us for choosing United rather than a budget airline that pays less attention to safety issues, even though United may be more expensive. The inference was that, if you flew United, at least your body wouldn't have been scarfed down by an Everglades alligator. I was taken aback by his comments, but he did have a point.
Not that something bad can't happen on a major airline.
Sometimes things do fall apart. Sometimes the center cannot hold.
And the odds of things falling apart increase when the parts being used in planes are fake.
Somehow, it seems, a fake company, "with fake employees and an address that was a glorified PO box," managed to sell bogus parts to a number of airlines. Among the airlines that were suckered by AOG Technics were Southwest - to me a "must avoid" outfit, given their emphasis on pestering travelers with their idea of fun; United; and my old friend, my frequent flyer buddy, American.
The mysterious London-based firm stands accused of falsifying certain documents and shipping the suspect parts to airline repair shops around the world. Companies like AOG Technics are middlemen that supply parts to independent firms that airlines contract to do repairs on their planes. The parts in question were used to repair jet engines made by CFM International, a joint venture between GE and the French firm Safran, used in older models of Airbus and Boeing engines. CFM is now suing AOG Technics in London’s High Court to get access to documents that would illustrate the extent of its fraud, so that all the bogus parts can be tracked down. So far, CFM believes AOG Technics may have sold thousands of parts with fraudulent documentation. (Source: Fortune via Yahoo)
The fake parts have only been found in 100 planes, out of a worldwide fleet of over 25,000. Still, this isn't exactly swell news for flyers.
I would have thought that, when it comes to aviation, there would be a really rigorous and highly regulated supply chain, with super-tracking on every part that flows through it. And this is, in fact, the case.
But last spring a repair firm in Portugal found that its name was being used on forged documents. This led to an investigation that found AOG Technics as the ur-source for the suspected bad parts.
...“While there have always been gray and black markets in aircraft parts, mostly purchased by questionable customers, this is a case of a “deep fake” company masquerading as a legitimate supplier that deceived many legitimate buyers,” [airline consultant Robert] Mann said.
Such gray market companies tend to specialize in components that are supposed to be scrapped for some reason or other, but which are passed on to lower-end companies that operate on the cheap. (Like our old - now defunct - friend, ValuJet.)
Sounds like the buyers who got duped weren't doing any head's up vetting of AOG as a supplier.
Maybe with a little sleuthing, they might have found that AOG Technics "created several fake LinkedIn profiles claiming to be company executives." One of the fake profiles was for a sales exec named Johnny Rico, a profile that "featured stock photos and employment histories that couldn’t be verified by any of their purported former employers."
On the other hand, maybe you can't blame those folks in procurement who didn't do a deeper dive than looking at LinkedIn and thinking that things checked out. How deep are you expected to go? Although a name like "Johnny Rico" might have raised some eyebrows. (This reminds me of a incident at a financial services company that my sister Kath worked for back in the 1980's. An internal audit discovered that a contract employee was funneling money to the Moonies. The contract employee had quite a name: Joseph Taco. Any relation to Johnny Rico?)
Then there was AOG Technics address: a "virtual" address at a co-working space. Hmmmm.
Well, AOG Technics is no longer a worry. Their "website and LinkedIn profile are no longer active," and they show up on Google as "permanently closed."
Given the complexity of today's supply chains, and the fact that they're multinational, it's no surprise that there'd be fraudsters inserting themselves at various nodes in the chain.
My next flight - Ireland again - is coming up next week.
Here's hoping that my Aer Lingus plane won't contain any sketchy parts. I'd hate to see that plane widening in the gyre and dunking into the drink. But, gee, thanks to this news, I probably will be spending at least a nano-second worry about it.
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Meanwhile, there's a newish (2018) Nigerian airline called Value Jet. What's in a name?
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