By Sam Tobin and Tim Hepher
LONDON (Reuters) – Jet engine maker CFM International said on Wednesday up to 96 airliners may be taken out of service for checks as the fallout from a probe into suspected supplies of engine components with false paperwork by a British distributor reached a UK court.
Matthew Reeve, a lawyer representing CFM and its co-owners General Electric and Safran, said AOG Technics had engaged in a “deliberate, dishonest and sophisticated scheme to deceive the market with falsified documents on an industrial scale”.
He told London’s High Court that 86 “falsified release certificates” had been found and that, by Monday, the number of engines suspected to have parts with forged documents had risen to 96, compared with a previously published tally of 68.
“Potentially, that means between 48 and 96 aircraft being taken out of service whilst airlines arrange for the parts to be removed,” Reeve added.
GE, Safran and CFM are suing London-based AOG Technics Limited and its sole director Jose Zamora Yrala after regulators said they were investigating reports that it had supplied parts for widely used CFM56 jet engines supported by forged documents.
They asked the High Court on Tuesday to order AOG and Zamora Yrala to preserve relevant documents and to disclose sales documents relating to CF6 and CFM56 engines since February 2015.
Lawyers representing AOG and Zamora Yrala said the defendants are “co-operating fully” with an investigation by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, which sent a lawyer as an observer to Tuesday’ first procedural hearing in the case.
They opposed the order on the grounds that it was both unnecessary and excessively burdensome, and questioned the use that would be made of the detailed sales information.
AOG’s lawyer Tom Cleaver argued GE did not need a large amount of documents in order to contact companies that may have bought components from AOG.
“Everybody now knows that AOG parts are not necessarily to be taken to be the claimants’ parts,” he said.
AOG did not address the underlying claim of forgery in the hearing, which was called to discuss procedural issues.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its main number, which went to hold then voicemail.
The CFM56 jet engine powers the previous generation of Boeing 737s and about half of the previous generation of Airbus A320s. The twin-engined models are gradually being replaced by newer equivalents but thousands of them remain in service.
So far findings affect a tiny fraction of the 23,000 CFM56 engines still in service worldwide, but analysts have said any sign of invalid parts entering the highly regulated aviation ecosystem must be taken seriously.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), in a regulatory bulletin first reported by Bloomberg, told airlines in August that it had received reports of parts with suspected falsified documents being supplied by AOG Technics.
Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said in August it was “investigating the supply of a large number of suspect unapproved parts” through London-based AOG Technics.
(This story has been corrected to say release certificates, not re-certificates, in paragraph 3)
(Reporting by Sam Tobin, Tim Hepher; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
