Fake Chinese Parts 'Found In US Planes'

Off-Topic Off Topic - Militaria
#1

More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.
A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force’s largest cargo plane.
The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.
“This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs,” committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said.
“It underscores China’s failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify,” he added.
As part of a year-long investigation , the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet.
Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers.
The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the “epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting”.
The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed.
US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.
The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking “knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems”.
Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to “our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it”.
“The Department of Defense and its contractors must attack this problem more aggressively, particularly since counterfeiters are becoming better at shielding their dangerous fakes from detection,” he said.
The fakes included parts in the electromagnetic interference filters used in night missions and in the operation of “hellfire” missiles on SH-60B Navy helicopters.
They were also found in memory chips in the display systems of C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J military cargo planes, and in the Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft.

Source:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/fake-chinese-parts-found-us-planes-103012001.html
#2

Another report on the fakes, all though it trys to focus its blame on the Chinese (as well as Britain and Canada) it does also say that they do not vet their suppliers, hmmmm penny pinching again, just look for the cheapest.

Which military in their right mind also goes shopping on the internet (no doubt ebay) looking for new parts for its aircraft and missiles.

Flood of Fake Chinese Parts in US Military Gear
Tuesday, 22 May 2012 08:30 PM
Fake electronic parts are widespread in key U.S. military systems and threaten national security, with China the top source for bogus gear, a U.S. Senate investigation has concluded.
The year-long probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee found counterfeit electronic parts from China in the Air Force’s C-130J cargo plane, in assemblies for Special Operations helicopters and in the Navy’s Poseidon surveillance plane, the panel said in its report released on Monday.
The investigation found 1,800 incidents of bogus parts in the Department of Defense supply chain in 2009 and 2010. The total number of suspected fake parts in those cases topped 1 million, it said.
“The failure of a single electronic part can leave a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine vulnerable at the worst possible time,” the report said.
“Unfortunately, a flood of counterfeit electronic parts has made it a lot harder to prevent that from happening.”
Besides creating national security and safety risks, the fake parts drive up costs. The price tag for replacing a bogus memory device in a Missile Defense Agency missile, for example, was $2.7 million.
The probe found that reporting into a Defense Department program set up to identify fake parts was “severely lacking.” Only 271 reports of suspect counterfeit parts were filed with the program in the 2009-2010 period that the Armed Services Committee examined.
China was the source for 70 percent of the more than 100 incidents of bogus equipment the committee traced back through the supply chain, followed by Britain and Canada, the Senate panel concluded.
China has failed to take steps to halt counterfeiting and the Pentagon did not know the scope and impact of fake parts, it said. The defense industry’s reliance on unvetted distributors raises risks for national security and for U.S. service personnel, it added.

#3

Well, anytime one gets sloppy in vetting of suppliers, this will happen. The possibility for damage to the National defense is horrific, and the risk unacceptable. Not so many years ago, counterfeit jet engine parts started to find their way into the civilian/commercial supply line, and these very substandard turbine parts cause some catastrophic engine failures. These parts appeared to be genuine in all respects, but once they began to come apart, tests of metallurgy, and fabrication showed them to be cleverly copied fakes.

#4

Its not as if this is a new thing, I can remember in the 1970’s and several airliners had engines fall off in flight. It was traced iirc to an Italian or Spanish company that instead of destroying the fasteners used to hold the engines onto the aircraft after they had been used, they were cleaning them up and re-selling them as new parts.