Airplane engines with Suspect Unapproved Parts could fail and cause a crash. Regulators’ and manufacturer’s notices setup off urgent hunts for parts bought from AOG Technics with forged data. The unapproved parts identified first came from the “hot” part of the jet engines where every part is safety critical. CFM has publicly stated no “Any such parts found would result in an airplane grounded until inspections occurred and parts were replaced."
The hunt for data, and then the parts, involved all touches. Every party started searching no matter who the ‘buyer’ was for a part (airline, certified aircraft maintenance operation, jet engine depot service center, central parts servicer, etc).
The faked data was on Forms (originally paper) required by regulators all over the globe. The Authorized Release Certificate (ARC) are formatted by different regulators including details of manufacturing, parts identification, tracing data, dates, and responsible parties (and other data). The responsible manufacturers originate these Forms that travel with the parts to be parts of the records package of the engines and aircraft.
The use of Suspect Unapproved Parts (SUP) in the airline jet engine supply chains has caused urgent queries against records dating back to 2015 about AOG Technics. It didn’t matter if there had been updates and upgrades to computer applications, changes in business ownership or operations, or the airplane/engine had been owned by someone else during that time period. The risk was for parts failing when no maintenance was due, or expected, even after thousands of hours of operation.
The custody of data on maintenance and servicing should ultimately reside with the current owner and operator. The data will certainly describe the inspection and repair work done. This includes data on events and work done. The inspections are prescribed for regular intervals (for example, calendar or operating hours), and upon events (failures, external events like flying thru volcanic ash, or instrument readings outside normal values). Repair procedures cover the “standard procedures” as defined by manufacturers, work resulting from regular and unscheduled inspections, and “overhauls” where major maintenance is performed at intervals or when needed. Parts are replaced due to scheduled maintenance or when needed from failures and inspections. Many records are extremely detailed on “what”, “when”, “who did the work”, and “how” work was done. Regulators and internal inspections/checks will confirm “paperwork” for each process, shop, timing, part, work step, and certified mechanic.
The parts records in the supply chain, so far, have shown multiple parties finding forged certificates and parts custody. Bad ARC’s have been detected at external jet engine servicing operators, airlines, the manufacturer (internal parts acquisition and service operations), and parts suppliers. In the long time period to be searched (and without records and effective cooperation from AOG Technics) there will be gaps. Records were lost, data migrations didn’t pick up all the information (or the paper records didn’t transfer), firms will have gone out of business, and some of the ARC’s may never have existed or supplied at each step in the chain of custody.
The parts purchase records may, or may not, be kept in the same systems at the same levels of detail. The systems of record aren’t uniform in how they retain Forms’ Data supplied by each enterprise touching parts in the entire supply chain. Ideally each party in each transaction would have copies of the paperwork. Public disclosures are clear where this assumption was false. Relating the data between parts used, and parts purchasing, was the challenge for all of the jet operators after the urgent notices they received.
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