Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight
The mysterious London-based AOG Technics is accused of falsifying paperwork for plane parts that ended up being sold around the world.
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.
My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
I remember watching an American 60 Minutes episode about commercial airlines buying fake plane parts, maybe 20+ years ago. Depressing to see it still happens.
It has had two consecutive summers plagued with seemingly constant flight delays and cancellations as “revenge travel” grips a worldwide public eager to get out after a pandemic-era hibernation.
Instead these parts “get sold cheaply to customers who need inexpensive replacements.” Black market dealings can be slightly more nefarious in nature, often entailing sale of military technology to countries that are under international sanctions, such as selling spare F-14 fighter jets to Iran.
In addition to allegedly forging documents for airplane parts it appears that AOG Technics created several fake LinkedIn profiles claiming to be company executives, according to Bloomberg.
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.
Other documents show a series of shifting corporate addresses, some of which end up back at either a coworking space in London and the offices of a now-retired accountant in a sleepy West Sussex town.
A Certificate of Incorporation filed with the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales in January 2021 listed Kensho’s headquarters at the same London address of AOG Technics—the North Nova building just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace.
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That's a clever scam. The magic is all in the name. AOG stand for Aircraft On Ground. Whenever there is a sefty risk identified, the rules says authorities and the industry must be advised within 24h. When a customer call about an AOG there is no 24h thing must happen right fucking now. Safety issues mean a plane could fall someday maybe, but AOG mean loosing money right now, by the minutes. So if you have a distributor that can send a part that will get the plane off the ground, with a bunch of papers it's getting sold for a high price.