British Company Sold Fake Spare Parts to Boeing and Airbus Airliner Engines

Confidence in Boeing's ubiquitous narrow-body airliner has already been hit by a pair of disasters involving its newest B737Max model. Now British and European aviation regulators have found engine components with forged quality certificates.

A British company sold phoney spare parts for passenger jet engines with forged authenticity documents, a European regulator has reported.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said London-based firm AOG Technics supplied parts for General Electric and Safran engines fitted to Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 short-haul airliners — the two most common passenger aircraft in service worldwide.

“Numerous Authorised Release Certificates for parts supplied via AOG Technics have been forged,” EASA said in a statement.

The ostensible manufacturers of the items “confirmed that they did not produce the certificate, and that they were not the originator of the part."

The parts were for the Safran CFM56 turbofan engine, a design from a joint venture by US firm General Electric and France's Safran, formerly Snecma. The engine is the most-used airliner power plant in the world.

CFM said it had found 72 falsified documents covering 50 part numbers for the engine, along with two for the older CF6 fitted to many larger wide-bodied airliners.

The regulator has told aircraft operators not to use components accompanied by the false documentation. On Thursday it said that AOG technics had as yet failed to give detailed information on their origin.

The British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had earlier warned airlines on August 4 that it was investigating “a large number of Suspect Unapproved Parts.”

Klaus Mueller, a former senior executive at MTU Aero Engines and German flag carrier Lufthansa's maintenance operation, said parts documentation was “a very critical issue.”

“The industry is taking this topic very, very seriously,” Mueller stressed.