There’s more to this

Fraud squad investigators investigating a company accused of supplying fake aeroplane parts to airlines around the world have arrested a man.

The man was being questioned on Wednesday after his home was searched by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the National Crime Agency (NCA).

London-based AOG Technics has supplied parts to airlines around the world, but has been accused of selling products using fake safety documents.

In some cases it has caused aircraft to be grounded, sending carriers and manufacturers scrambling to discover whether they are affected.

The money to be made doing this is huge. Therefore someone will do it. That’s just what happens. Not desirable, by any means, but it will happen.

However, there’s something else too:

Jet engine maker CFM International discovered a quality issue related to powdered metal at an unnamed supplier in 2021, and has fully implemented repairs, the head of CFM’s joint owner Safran said on Thursday.

The disclosure of the issue involving a limited number of parts during a quarterly results call comes days after RTX unit Pratt & Whitney, the main competitor to CFM, ordered inspections on 1,200 engines of Airbus A320neo jets after a problem with contaminated powdered metal.

A slew of jet engines have had to be taken out of service out of this – entirely legal, not based upon false paperwork – problem with the metal powders used in original manufacture. My guess here – and it’s totally a guess, therefore highly likely to be wrong – is that someone’s been trying to use a cheapier rhenium supplier. One with too much potassium in the original ammonnium perrhenate and not processing that out before making the metal. The reason I make this guess is that it’s something that the industry knows has to be very tightly controlled, the Kazakh high potassium APR trades at a discount to the “western” material without the problem. Well, you know, maybe. That could be my possession of a hammer and looking for the nail.

But the interest here is, well, how much of that CFM problem is now going to get blamed on the bloke with the dodgy certificates? It’s one of those possibilities, isn’t it?