Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Alitheon, calls on the industry to take firm, lasting action to identify and prevent counterfeit aircraft parts.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that 2% of the 26 million parts installed each year on aircraft are counterfeit. That is a staggering 520,000 parts! Surprising? Unfortunately not.
Suspected unapproved parts (SUPs) have been a long-standing issue in aviation, endangering passenger safety. Look no further than the last 12 months where multiple instances of fraudulent parts have been installed on aircraft in the US, including fake titanium on new aircraft; used engine parts with fake paperwork installed as new on US airliners; and counterfeit computer boards on military aircraft. Despite the industry’s awareness of it being susceptible to fraud and misidentification, little has been done to solve the problem, putting lives at risk every day.
After the most recent issue in which AOG Technics was caught selling used engine parts as if they were new, some of the world’s largest aviation-related manufacturers formed the Aviation Supply Chain Integrity Coalition. They studied the problem for months with the goal of recommending how to prevent such issues from happening. The 13 resulting recommendations that were released address vendor accreditation, document traceability and verification, and non-serialised parts traceability.
While these recommendations raise awareness for a real and dangerous problem, they ultimately fail to truly set the course for safer aviation. There are critical shortcomings that simply reinforce the industry status quo that has continued to allow unapproved parts to infiltrate the supply chain. A problem of which the highest consequences fall on the unknowing passengers.
Proxy-based approaches are inherently vulnerable to fraud
A key issue with these recommendations is a continued focus on paperwork and proxies (such as labels, etchings, or data plates) as the ‘source of truth’ for identifying, authenticating, and tracing aircraft parts. The recommendations purport that “documentation plays a critical role in tracking parts in the aviation supply chain, and maintaining the industry’s commitment and focus on safety requires a robust process by companies to correctly track, inventory, and validate paperwork to follow manufacturing and maintenance procedures”.
Paperwork and documents are used for data collection. They don’t provide any reliable way to identify the actual physical parts nor trace them through the value chain. They have proven to not be enough to stop fraud as they will always be subject to manipulation, and vulnerable to forgery. Even legitimate protected documents, at best, only mean the documents themselves are legitimate – not the physical parts they have the data for. It is this disconnect between physical parts and data, that opens the door for the introduction of fraudulent parts into the ecosystem. Just as worrisome, that same gap also enables unintentional human error, which can lead to the same devastating consequences.
Although the coalition suggests a shift towards digital paperwork as a solution to enhance the “security, efficiency, and traceability of the supply chain”, even digital paperwork is subject to the same fallacy as physical paperwork – it protects the data but not the actual part itself, and it’s just as easy for bad actors to manipulate digital documents.
All of this is to say that documentation, while a critical part of collecting data, will NOT stop fraudulent parts from entering the supply chain and being installed on aircraft. This over-reliance on paperwork (physical or digital) is why the aviation industry has struggled to fight fraudulent parts for decades. The coalition’s focus on various documentation approaches will only serve to further exacerbate the issue. What the industry needs are solutions that inextricably link a physical part to its protected data, enabling a part to be used as its own identifier, and connecting it to digitally protected provenance and use data.
‘Optional’ guidelines continue to reinforce the status quo
Another major shortfall of these recommendations is that they are presented as “optional”, failing to mandate concrete action even for the members of the coalition presenting them. The recommendations “constitute actions that industry members can undertake as voluntary measures, and are intended to supplement any efforts by regulatory bodies”.
Without clear incentive for the industry to change, progress cannot be expected with any sense of urgency. For example, the FAA has authorised the optional use of certain electronic forms since 2009. However, the adoption of digital ARCs across the industry remains sluggish, with the norm still being physical paper. This is a telling example of what happens when things are voluntary – the path of least resistance is easier, and therefore favoured, even at the risk of the flying public. Why should we expect these new recommendations will be any different?
Given the tremendous risk to lives involved, not to mention the financial and reputational harms to airlines and manufacturers, it would be reasonable for the coalition and industry at large to mandate actions to improve aviation value chain integrity and security. As long as these guidelines remain entirely voluntary or require the government to intervene, the industry maintains the option of not having to change at all.
With that said, it would behove national regulatory agencies such as the FAA and EASA, as well as global organisations like ICAO and IATA, to set the tone of safety for the industry and establish policies requiring change. When it comes to safety at such a large scale, this is exactly where it makes sense for government and regulatory bodies to step in and mandate forward-looking action. Set policy, and industry will find a way to meet it. Set optional action, and industry will find a way to do the minimum required to check the proverbial box.
The technologies to solve these challenges exist today
Although the recommendations note that “no single recommended action will solve the challenge” of unapproved parts, new technological solutions can in fact comprehensively address the issue. Moreover, setting a goal of having technologies to identify physical items to be met five or more years into the future is disappointing given such technologies, both to protect data, and irrefutably identify physical parts without the need of proxies, exist and are available today.
Blockchain and web3 solutions are used regularly to protect the integrity of digital data. Similarly, solutions that make an item its own identifier, and eliminate the reliance on proxies, are already being employed in other industries to address the identification of non-serialised as well as serialised items. These technologies also eliminate fraudulent, counterfeit, and gray-market items, as well as enable complete transparency and traceability from manufacturing through reuse, recycle, and end-of-life.
In the same way a human can have a fake ID or passport, but their biometrics irrefutably identify them, the aviation industry can and must adopt a similar approach to parts identification, authentication, and traceability. Human-related systems have moved to a zero-trust philosophy that enhances and increases security. The aviation industry must move to a zero-trust parts philosophy, especially when dealing with safety-related or high consequence parts.
The aviation industry requires one-in-a-billion as the highest probability of a catastrophic failure per hour of operation. We should not accept that this very same industry continues to allow a 2% counterfeit parts rate for years to come. The difference between real and fraudulent parts can be the difference between life and death; and the time for the industry to truly commit to change and take concrete action is now.
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