Bogus Parts

6 Pages 1465 Words

With aircraft inventories aging, “bogus” aircraft parts have become a serious problem for commercial and civil aviation on an international scale. The high cost of approved aircraft parts and relatively lax enforcement have created a lucrative market for criminals to introduce counterfeit and misrepresented aircraft parts into every facet of the aviation industry.
The aviation industry has dubbed aircraft parts as “bogus” which are fraudulent knock-offs, parts with misrepresented age, parts with prior crash damage, or parts with misrepresented composition(such as parts made of an inferior alloy).
The Federal Aviation Administration has placed “bogus” parts in the much broader category of “unapproved parts”. The category of unapproved parts can contain “bogus” parts as well as legitimate parts that are misused and legitimate parts that have merely an incorrect paper-trail. The Federal Aviation Administration contests that a vast majority of unapproved parts are legitimate aircraft parts with incorrect or insufficient paper-trails.
Many critics have accused the Federal Aviation Administration of using the innocuous category of unapproved parts as an attempt to hide the serious problem of “bogus” parts from the flying public. As reported by BusinessWeek magazine: “The FAA allegedly pressured the NTSB to stop listing bogus parts in its database as a possible cause of crashes, according to four independent sources: a senior FAA official, as well as sources in the Transportation Dept., the airline industry, and congressional staff.” The Federal Aviation Administration maintains that they did not pressure the NTSB and recommended the changes to make the database more accurate. Currently no accidents are listed with the probable cause of “bogus” parts.
One aspect pertaining to the success of “bogus” parts sales is the potential savings to maintenance departments and the potential profit to parts b...