Aviation Supply Chain Integrity Coalition members toured Delta TechOps as part of their research. Coalition co-chairs John Porcari and Robert Sumwalt appear in the middle.
A coalition of airlines, OEMs and MROs is recommending 13 ways to make the aviation supply chain stronger following nine months of intense research.
In June 2023, TAP Air Portugal flagged a CFM56 engine part from AOG Technics that didn’t seem to match its paperwork, and Safran quickly confirmed the paperwork was falsified. The engine aftermarket then sprang into action to determine if there were more of those faulty parts in the market. Investigations uncovered 95 parts with falsified documents impacting more than 100 CFM56 and GE CF6 engines.
The group of eight companies—Airbus, American Airlines, Boeing, Delta Air Lines, GE Aerospace, Safran, StandardAero and United Airlines—formed the Aviation Supply Chain Integrity Coalition in February to initially prevent unauthorized parts from entering the market. The scope evolved to include all unapproved parts.
The 13 recommendations fall into three main categories: strengthening vendor accreditation, document traceability and verification, and non-serialized parts traceability. Each bucket includes short-, medium- and long-term goals.
Under vendor accreditation, “We recommend greater use of suppliers that meet quality standards established by regulatory authorities,” says Robert Sumwalt, former NTSB chairman and co-chair of the coalition. Longer term, the coalition recommends establishing a feedback loop with the parts installers and the accreditors. “This will allow them to share information to wider communities if they suspect a bad actor,” he adds.
Under document traceability and verification, “We believe it’s critically important to have part suppliers digitize key documents, including expanding the use of digital signatures,” Sumwalt says. The group also urges the industry to create a standardized parts form to ensure consistency. “This will reduce the variability and facilitate easier compliance checks,” he says.
For non-serialized parts, two key recommendations involve strengthening best practices for training parts inspectors and verifying the auditing of scrap material to prevent it from reentering the market.
Former U.S. Transportation Deputy Secretary John Porcari, the other co-chair, and Sumwalt emphasized that many of the coalition members are already doing these things or are implementing the changes.
For example, “GE Aerospace has digitized records going back to 2015 and is now digitizing key documents” when an engine enters a shop for maintenance, Sumwalt says. GE also is piloting digital signatures later in 2024.
StandardAero “has developed a procedure to maintain control of all of the different paths that scrap material may follow, preventing unserviceable material from reentering the supply chain,” he says.
While the 13 recommendations represent best practices already used by some companies—until more implement them, gaps could exist.
“When we talk about the supply chain in aerospace, the emphasis is on chain,” Porcari says. “You need to address every link in that chain.”
The coalition encourages all companies to incorporate the recommendations so they don’t become the weak link in the supply chain. Porcari points out that the 13 recommendations are “performance-based and technology-agnostic,” to “give the industry flexibility to act on them, and we need them to act.”
The more companies that join the coalition, “the sooner we strengthen the safety and integrity of the supply chain,” he adds.
