Report: Planes Grounded Over Potentially Dangerous Parts

Planes are getting grounded amid concerns that some of their engine parts were sold with fraudulent safety certificates, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.

Major airlines based in the United States, including American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Delta Airlines, are affected.

The Federal Aviation Administration and European investigators are probing the firm responsible for selling the parts, AOG Technics, for allegedly producing fake safety certificates to sell parts to airlines.

A middleman that acquired parts before selling them, AOG has also got attention for appearing to create fake employees with stock photographs on LinkedIn, Bloomberg found.

So far, the FAA and its European counterparts have found AOG parts in 126 engines across multiple airlines. The most affected engine models are CFM56s, installed in jets ranging from the 737 MAX to the Airbus A320.

Both jets power flights across the world each day.

The issue might be disastrous for the airline industry and regulators, which are suppose to institute stringent safety tests to ensure that parts, especially engine components, are airworthy.

According to the Mirror, the impacted parts can go anywhere from screws and bolts to turbine blades. Many of the parts appear to have been made by General Electric and Safran, companies now suing AOG.

"It's a bit strange that a phantom company can be allowed to supply spare parts with false certification documents," Safran CEO Olivier Andriès told reporters in September.

In GE and Safran's lawsuit, the firms claim they were initially alerted to the problem in June after the engineering and maintenance teams of TAP Air Portugal caught it.

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