Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight
Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight
The mysterious London-based AOG Technics is accused of falsifying paperwork for plane parts that ended up being sold around the world.
Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight::Why are so many flights getting canceled or delayed? Blame a mysterious British supplier accused of falsified documents for plane components.
My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
e: I am not surprised.
After all of the high profile train derailments in recent history, primarily caused by decaying infrastructure, bad standards, and cutting corners, makes me wonder if there's someone with an extensive background in rail out there with a license plate that says "FLY AIR".
I guess it's really just a question of whether you take the risk you know or the one you don't.
That's cargo rail tho. Fatal passenger rail accidents are very rare and involve multiple human and system failures.
I am an Aerospace Engineer (I was an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer by trade prior to going to University) and I have spent the last 30 years in the airline industry….it isn’t as bad as you are allegedly making it out to be….pilots are not engineers either…..
Experience from the 60’s and 70’s isn’t really relevant to today’s industry- I started in the early 90’s and it’s massively different today from back then….so your point is?
I am also based in Australia so that might also make a bit of a difference because we have had no airline crashes in this country and we have a very strict Potentially Unwanted Parts (PUP’s) system and other checks and balances that because we are under EASA based regulations and not FAA ones (who, by the way allowed the PMA part system….where parts are no longer required to be manufactured by the OEM for aircraft….and I’ve got plenty of stories about that nonsense…)
So yeah…. I quite happily still fly everywhere around the world….
My dad is both a pilot and engineer. I’m aware not all pilots are. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. If you’re in the industry, this will dox me, but my dad designed the Taylorcraft tri-gear (the F-22; there are still Taylorcrafts out there with rivets I put in them in the early 80s, because I basically grew up in the factory), and converted the original WACO biplane blueprints from the Smithsonian to modern specs so they could be manufactured again. He also designed the WACO Super class and their conversion to sea floats about ten years ago or so (the YMF-5; as an aerospace engineer, I’m sure you know that’s not a simple engineering task). He designed and engineered all the features this video from last year talks about; I don’t mean ancient history.
He’s currently 88 and still works full-time at WACO. He knows what he’s talking about. He still travels to the EU about every year for WACO. His knowledge is not outdated.
My point is just to relay what I’ve heard from my dad on this topic for US airlines specifically, and that I trust his opinion personally. Nothing more.
e: sorry for all the edits, my Lemmy client hates me. FWIW, one of my dad’s current titles at WACO is ‘Airworthiness Manager’. You can find him on LinkedIn. Just search ‘waco classic airworthiness manager’.
Yikes.
For a while I hated flying. Freaked me out even though I knew statistically it is a safe form of travel. Then I watched a bunch of Air Disasters shows and realized how many fixes they have put in place and I felt a lot better about flying.
Then I subbed to /r/AviationMaintenance. I really don't want to fly anymore.
The first time I went skydiving, my instructor was a retired aircraft mechanic. He said something along the lines of “People always ask me why I’d want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I tell them that I worked on planes for 30 years, and there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Used to think it was statistically safe, then 737MAX crashes happened. Not trusting any airplane manufacturer any more.
Sounds like my dad, who after working as a computer programmer consultant since the early 70s, has become a Luddite, to the point that he won't even wear a digital watch. I wonder what a railroad engineer would tell your father.
Once you've seen the sausage made it's hard to love sausage. Doesn't mean the sausage is terrible, it just makes you think of watching it get made.
Earlier this year a bunch of people got stuck on a 4 hour Amtrak ride for like 18+ hours, without power, toilets or water. Were told they couldn't leave and not allowed/able to transfer to another train.
I'd rather just die in an incredibly rare plane crash than trust AmTrak to get me across the country in days versus a flight which can get me there in hours.
They need budget to actually upgrade their fleet.
That’s happened multiple times with planes, not just once last year.
It happened as recently as last month
Here are more:
I could keep going, but this is hard on mobile.
Point is, that happens with planes, too. That’s a logistics issue, not about the method of transport.
Story may have a bit of “then everyone clapped” vibes, but I can definitely get down with more trains.
I remember watching an American 60 Minutes episode about commercial airlines buying fake plane parts, maybe 20+ years ago. Depressing to see it still happens.
I remember that one. They also discussed how most large airports had the ability to fully service aircraft and how there were only a few depots such as Texas and hiring skilled illegals as mechanics to service the majority of aircraft to cut costs and take advantage of those workers.
So what happened to the whole "every part is tracked from production to installation and through maintenance checks?"
that's how they figured this out.
if aviation parts were like auto parts, it would be next to impossible to trace which jets had the bogus parts and how long it had been installed
Non-paywall link for anyone: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/escalating-scandal-grips-airlines-including-190553757.html
Thank you.
You wouldn't download a jet engine...
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/qsvpU7G5IJg?si=YalJq9VGyxQ6JIYF
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What I want to know is what that part was.
TurboEncabulator. The most precise component in the entire evolutionary aeroplane cycle. I would not want a counterfeit.
I shudder to think that a plane could have gotten off the ground with its turbo unencabulated. The horror.
That's old tech. The HyperEncabulator is where it's at.
Since nobody have a serious reply, two parts are mentioned in the article, a turbine blade and a turbine nozzle.
Oh, nothing important then
Rooting for beverage cart panel.
Fly by night industry indeed.
this is occuring in other industries as well to the point of affecting a lot of stuff surprised there is not more articles pertaining to this
Right to repair your tractor? Hell no!
Fake ass parts with MTBF of a few hundred hours installed by the dealer? Yeah that's cool!
Thanks regulatory capture and corrupt govt!!!
Boo, paywall. Anyone have a list of the affected airlines?
Tbh better for the consumer to pay for a newspaper than have it run by some billionaire who can afford to run it endlessly free of charge just so he can propagate his world view.
For example, The Washington Post now run owned by Jeff bezos give all the free articles how keeping the billionaire class and cooking the planet is actually a good thing
First time I see that website actually working.
Southwest, United, American Airlines, Virgin Australia
Glad I fly Delta, even with the typically higher cost.
Real news costs money while fake news are free. Guess what happens?
I am very glad my next international trip will by by train.
Until it derails die to shitty track maintenance, or a drunk consuctor
Accidents happen everywhere and airplanes are about the safest mode of transport
I prefer my crashes to be remedied by holding a button for seven seconds.
Well that is scary!
Oh cool wardogs 2: the enshittification with jonah hill should be dope
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It has had two consecutive summers plagued with seemingly constant flight delays and cancellations as “revenge travel” grips a worldwide public eager to get out after a pandemic-era hibernation.
Instead these parts “get sold cheaply to customers who need inexpensive replacements.” Black market dealings can be slightly more nefarious in nature, often entailing sale of military technology to countries that are under international sanctions, such as selling spare F-14 fighter jets to Iran.
In addition to allegedly forging documents for airplane parts it appears that AOG Technics created several fake LinkedIn profiles claiming to be company executives, according to Bloomberg.
Several of the filings are riddled with typos, including misspelled executive titles and oddly capitalized words that appear to have happened when someone hit caps lock instead of the “A” key.
Other documents show a series of shifting corporate addresses, some of which end up back at either a coworking space in London and the offices of a now-retired accountant in a sleepy West Sussex town.
A Certificate of Incorporation filed with the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales in January 2021 listed Kensho’s headquarters at the same London address of AOG Technics—the North Nova building just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace.
The original article contains 1,523 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Several of the filings are riddled with typos, including misspelled executive titles and oddly capitalized words that appear to have happened when someone hit caps lock instead of the “A” key.
Which just goes to show, if you're gonna type in fraudulent things, get a keyboard with no caps-lock key.
Sir, we've discovered that these fuselages that we have been installing for the last 3 months are all made out of paper mache.
CEO: Shit we're going to get sued! Do anything else to tell me?
We opened up a black box and nothing was inside except for Three paper clips and a dead AA battery.
Right, well, best shellac the paper mache and get going
That's a clever scam. The magic is all in the name. AOG stand for Aircraft On Ground. Whenever there is a sefty risk identified, the rules says authorities and the industry must be advised within 24h. When a customer call about an AOG there is no 24h thing must happen right fucking now. Safety issues mean a plane could fall someday maybe, but AOG mean loosing money right now, by the minutes. So if you have a distributor that can send a part that will get the plane off the ground, with a bunch of papers it's getting sold for a high price.
I bought my Technics Direct-drive turntable Model SL-Q20 in 1981 or 1982, still working like a champ.
Flying southwest 3 times in November, wish me luck fellas
May the odds be ever in your favour
May the odds be ever in your favor.
May the sod never be in your collar
Something like that I'm not good at this
Just flew southwest twice last week... cool cool cool cool.
Hey, you just survived twice last week. It's something...
But. "flying the safest mode of transport"
And people wonder why I hate flying.