A fraud investigation centred on a small UK aircraft parts broker has sent ripples through the global aviation maintenance industry. In September 2023, a High Court ruling and a Federal Aviation Administration notice brought the full scale of the AOG Technics scandal into sharp relief — revealing that tens of thousands of engine components had been sold with forged safety certificates, and that aircraft carrying those parts remained in service.
How the fraud came to light
The trail began in June 2023, when technicians at a Portuguese maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility noticed irregularities in CFM International parts they had purchased from AOG Technics, a small UK-based broker. The paperwork described the components as new and certified, but closer examination revealed that the Authorised Release Certificates (ARCs) accompanying the parts had been forged — documents that, in a functioning supply chain, attest to a part’s origin and compliance with airworthiness standards.
CFM International — the joint venture between GE Aerospace and Safran that produces the CFM56 and LEAP engine families — notified airlines and regulators. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) opened an investigation. By the time the case reached the High Court in London on 20 September 2023, CFM had identified 126 engines from more than a dozen airlines fitted with suspect parts. One day later, the FAA issued an Unapproved Parts Notification (UPN), formally directing operators to inspect and remove any AOG Technics-supplied components.
The parts in question — bolts, washers, seals, bushings, and dampers — are non-serialised consumables. Their simplicity made them easy to counterfeit and difficult to trace. Director José Zamora reportedly sold over 60,000 such items with falsified documentation, generating approximately $9.3 million in revenue.
A systemic failure of trust
The implications extended well beyond the parts themselves. Aviation maintenance relies on a documented chain of provenance: each component must carry certification from an approved manufacturer or maintenance organisation before it can be installed. Forged ARCs sever that chain entirely, making it impossible to determine whether parts are genuine, used, or of entirely unknown origin.
Airlines affected included American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta, Southwest, Ryanair, WestJet, and Virgin Australia — carriers spanning three continents and tens of millions of annual passengers. The High Court order compelled AOG Technics to disclose the full list of transactions, but investigators cautioned that the full scale of the problem remained unclear, given the difficulty of retrospectively tracing non-serialised components through maintenance records.
The scandal drew renewed attention to the parts broker market’s regulatory position. Unlike approved production organisations (APOs), which are subject to direct and regular audits by aviation authorities, independent brokers do not hold production approvals and are not required to undergo equivalent scrutiny. Critics argued that this gap had long represented a vulnerability in the global supply chain — one the AOG Technics case had now made impossible to ignore.
Questions the industry could no longer defer
Regulators in the UK, US, and Europe indicated they were reviewing how oversight of the broker sector could be strengthened, though formal rulemaking was expected to take time. In the immediate term, airlines and MRO providers were advised to apply heightened due diligence when sourcing from independent brokers: verifying documentation against manufacturer records, requesting additional provenance evidence, and treating uncertainty as grounds for rejection rather than installation.
The case was a pointed reminder that airworthiness depends not only on engineering standards but on the integrity of the documentation ecosystem that underpins them. An aircraft component can meet every dimensional and metallurgical specification and still represent a safety hazard if its certification history cannot be trusted. That the affected parts were among the most routine items in the supply chain — the washers and seals that attract no individual scrutiny — made the vulnerability all the more significant.
Key vocabulary:
- Authorised Release Certificate (ARC) – the official document accompanying an aircraft part that certifies it was manufactured or maintained in accordance with approved airworthiness standards; a forged ARC renders a part unacceptable for installation
- Unapproved Parts Notification (UPN) – a formal notice issued by the FAA alerting the industry that a part has been identified as not meeting FAA approval requirements, directing operators to inspect and remove affected components
- maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) – the industry sector responsible for maintaining and repairing aircraft and their components; MRO facilities are often the first to detect part quality or documentation irregularities
- approved production organisation (APO) – a manufacturer formally approved by a national aviation authority to produce certified aircraft parts; independent brokers do not hold this status and are subject to less direct regulatory oversight
CEFR Level C1 / ICAO Level 5-6