Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight::Why are so many flights getting canceled or delayed? Blame a mysterious British supplier accused of falsified documents for plane components.
So what happened to the whole “every part is tracked from production to installation and through maintenance checks?”
that’s how they figured this out.
if aviation parts were like auto parts, it would be next to impossible to trace which jets had the bogus parts and how long it had been installed
It sounds like it is and that’s how they were able to catch on to this fake parts company.
I think he means, why didn’t they catch the first one?
You’ve tracked them, but that doesn’t mean you’ve followed up at every second of every day to see if the company still exists.
This is the right answer. When we perform maintenance on our aircraft there’s a logbook entry that contains very specific details about the part that went in, such as its serial number, but really that’s so the insurance company can track down the culprit after the crash. Not many individuals are doing the tracing themselves.
I think there is trust in the system because the part came with all the necessary paperwork and everything checks out. In this case the shady parts company was forging certification documents from other manufacturers. That’s going to be hard to catch no matter how effective the system is.
Everything checking out:
“Several of the filings are riddled with typos, including misspelled executive titles and oddly capitalized words that appear to have happened when someone hit caps lock instead of the “A” key.”
Yeah, it’ll be easy to catch if you actually dig into it, but if you’re not given a reason to, it might take a while to catch; which is exactly what happened
Nor did they ensure the credentials were legitimate, which is super hard if you’re not specifically looking for it and aware it’s occurring. Someone had insider knowledge and exploited a vulnerability.
Dock To stock policies and “there is no added value in inspection” LEAN sucks.
It’s called outsourcing. You outsource the risk and it magically goes away….
Or does it.
It sort of does. “Our vendor signed legally binding documents that they were responsible for vetting and verifying all parts. Sue them, not us.”
Unless by risk you mean an airplane falling out of the sky…
Risk impact comes in all forms from: it did nothing, to it destroyed our reputation, or even we killed people. Measuring risk impact and understanding the risks are incredibly important and outsourcing & hiding the risks behind a contract can’t protect your company’s reputation or the people killed at the end of the day