Air-Parts Pirates Crash and Burn

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 27, 1999 | by Sean Paige

Old, damaged parts are clinking around in aircraft flown all over the world via a billion-dollar chop-shop business that exchanges quick profits for possible human catastrophe.

The Colombian mountain crash site still was smoldering when scavengers went to work on the remains -- not vultures after carrion, but people, local salvagers, picking their way past 159 broken bodies to retrieve recognizable parts from the wreckage of what only hours earlier was American Airlines Flight 965 on approach to Cali.

But the hundreds of parts hauled down from the mountain that day in 1995 eventually were returned to the United States -- and resold as new and airworthy by a Miami dealer who obtained them through the black market. The dealer is part of a criminal minority in the $45 billion aviation-parts industry that trades in recycled, counterfeit, undocumented or otherwise unairworthy aircraft parts -- pocketing quick profits by putting other people's lives at risk.

Although more ghoulish than most, the Colombian episode was not an isolated case of air-parts piracy. Earlier this summer in a Chicago courtroom, an aircraft-parts importer was sentenced to more than a year in prison for his role in an elaborate international scheme to resell parts from two aircraft -- a British Airways Boeing 747 and a Kuwaiti McDonnell Douglas DC-9 -- blown up by Iraqi soldiers at Kuwaiti International Airport at the outset of the Persian Gulf War.

Judged a total write-off after the war, insurer Lloyd's of London contracted to have the scorched hulk of the British airliner scrapped. But the scrap dealer instead schemed to have portions of the airplane's giant engines shipped to an aviation-parts brokerage in Chicago, which then resold them to unsuspecting airlines. "When these parts started hitting the market and the serial numbers didn't jibe, people started calling around," said one investigator who worked the case. Detective work by the Department of Transportation inspector general, or IG, the FBI and New Scotland Yard resulted in indictments of three company officials as well as the removal of the suspect parts from the aircraft on which they'd been installed.

"Suspected unapproved parts," or SUPs -- the latest techno-euphemism for what once were called "bogus parts" -- includes everything from totally counterfeit parts to outdated parts passed off as new, to otherwise airworthy parts that somehow have been separated from their paper trail or aren't manufactured according to Federal Aviation Administration specifications. Manufacturing, misrepresenting or trading in air parts not in compliance with federal aviation regulations is a crime. But no section of the U.S. Code specifically addresses air-parts piracy, so most charges and convictions come from violating other sections of the U.S. code: laws against counterfeiting, making false statements, wire fraud and falsifying government documents.

Though there is some dispute about the actual risk SUPs pose to public safety -- the air industry and FAA tend to downplay the threat, while others, such as former Department of Transportation inspector general Mary Schiavo, say that it's all too real -- there is little doubt that the installation of a problem part could be catastrophic.

One of the most horrific of such confirmed incidents occurred Sept. 8, 1989, when a charter flight carrying 55 people from Norway to Germany plunged 22,000 feet into the North Sea after a tail section fastened with bogus bolts tore loose. Another near catastrophe occurred June 19, 1995, in Atlanta, when the engine on a ValuJet DC-9 exploded on takeoff, hurling shrapnel though the fuselage, causing a cabin fire and injuring passengers and crew. Investigators found the failure occurred in a replacement part overhauled at a non-FAA-approved repair station in Turkey. And trial was set this summer for the owner of California's Cherry Air Specialties, who is charged with selling junked helicopter tail rotors as airworthy, resulting in a fatal helicopter crash in New Zealand. His son pleaded guilty in May to charges related to the case.

An FAA analysis of its accident and incident database conducted several years ago found that unapproved parts played a role in 174 U.S. aircraft crashes or less serious accidents between May 1973 and April 1996, causing 17 deaths and 39 injuries -- though none involving a major airline. The National Transportation Safety Board has found that SUPs have factored into numerous accidents involving helicopters, private planes, cargo carriers -- even hot-air balloons.

Other experts have said the accident rates might even be higher. "It's very, very hard to pin the cause of an accident on a part that failed ... especially when the airplane is scattered over five acres," a former quality-control chief for one major airline told the Columbus Dispatch several years ago.

Though experts say the problem of potentially unsafe aircraft parts has been around for decades, only in the last few years have government and industry gotten serious about cracking down on offenders -- a change of attitude many attribute to the persistent activism of Schiavo, which has made her a controversial figure in some circles. One government official with whom Insight spoke calls her "Scary Mary"; others present her as a dedicated professional who dared to take on a powerful industry.