The problem today is that everyone gets duped because people are not taking the time to do their jobs and research. Here we have a serious situation where the airlines will lose millions of dollars and jeopardize air-travel safety. Incompetence, were they duped or just taking shortcuts with plausible deniability?
A shadowy UK-based company has sold jet engine parts backed by phony inspection certificates that have made their way into at least 126 jets around the world, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The biggest airlines in the US have been affected, including American, Delta, United and Southwest — which have had to pull the affected planes from service to inspect them.
It is not yet known how long aircraft with uncertified parts from AOG Technics LTD have been flying, but the alarm was first raised in June by a European airline.
Without proper certification, the incredibly tightly regulated aerospace industry can’t guarantee the parts will actually work — which could have disastrous consequences if they failed 30,000 feet in the air.
“When a supplying firm, in the supplying chain, certifies that these meet all the standards, those have to be guaranteed — and you should be able to take that at face value,” Dean Ramnath Chellapa, an associate professor at Emory University, told 11 Alive News.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case with AOG Technics. Closer investigation of the company — a middeman which supplied parts to aircraft manufacturers — revealed it used a virtual office in London near Buckingham Palace and fake employee profiles to make it appear more legitimate.
The company was founded in the UK in 2015 by Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, according to documents filed with Companies House in London, which keep records of who owns all businesses registered in the UK. He is believed to be a 35-year-old from Venezuela.
Source: New York Post – Read Full Article
