Airlines, engine makers race to track down bogus spare parts

Airlines and aircraft engine makers are racing to identify bogus spare parts that have infiltrated the global fleet via an obscure UK supplier, a potentially costly and complicated forensic endeavor affecting the world’s most widely flown passenger jets. Southwest said Friday that it had removed two “suspect parts” traced to closely held AOG Technics Ltd. from one of its Boeing Co. 737 aircraft, becoming the first major carrier to publicly disclose doing so. Hours earlier, CFM International Inc., the joint venture of General Electric Co. and Safran SA that makes the engines for many older-generation Airbus SE A320 and Boeing 737 aircraft, said parts with fraudulent documentation had been put on 68 of its power plants. The widening scandal has shaken an industry where safety is the guiding principle, with exacting standards for aircraft manufacturing and maintenance that demands each component be verified. Regulators, airlines and other industry players have been scouring their records to hunt down the suspect components sold by AOG, the obscure supplier at the center of the crisis. CFM, the world’s largest jet-engine manufacturer, filed a lawsuit in the UK against AOG Technics. The suit seeks an injunction to force AOG to provide more information to aid the aviation industry’s search for suspect components. It also seeks to recover any parts in AOG’s possession purported to be from CFM or GE. In response to questions from Bloomberg News, which first reported on the AOG case, Southwest said that two low-pressure turbine blades were the components it pulled from one of its engines. The carrier took “precautionary and immediate measures” to remove them based on the fact they were supplied by AOG. The parts were found in an engine on a Boeing 737 NG, an older version of Boeing’s most popular model. CFM supplies engines to both the Airbus and the Boeing planes. <br/>