Counterfeit products have been a problem for decades but things are getting much worse, as Fort Vale’s Graham Blanchard explains
Last October, a scandal broke in the global aviation industry after an investigation into a company by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office showed that it had allegedly supplied jet-engine parts to airlines using forged paperwork. The ramifications were obvious – if you fit sub-standard or unapproved parts to a machine that will undergo severe operational stress over the course of its working life, and those parts then fail, you will have a disaster on your hands.
This is precisely what happened to Partnair Flight 394 – a chartered flight that crashed in September 1989 off the coast of Denmark – three of the four bolts needed to hold the tailplane in place were counterfeit. The fake bolts and sleeves wore down excessively, causing the tail to vibrate for 16 completed flights and the accident flight, which killed all 55 people onboard when the tail fell off.
But it couldn’t happen in our industry, could it? Well, it does and, what’s more, it happens all the time – it doesn’t attract as much attention because the stakes are lower, but it is still a problem that refuses to go away.
In the past, seals and gaskets were (and are) particular targets. At Fort Vale, we have been seeing the after-effects of this dubious trade for many years. In a way, it’s understandable – valves are expensive pieces of kit, and you might be tempted to buy cheaper seals for that particular valve to save a few pennies – but when the seal fails, and therefore your valve fails as well, is it really much of a saving?
BUYER BEWARE
We sell OEM seals and gaskets, but we invest time, money and plenty of R&D to ensure that they are perfect for the job they are designed for, but what we have noticed is that some unscrupulous third-party manufacturers not only make claims for their equipment that don’t stack up, they will put our (and others) logos on their shoddy goods!
However, we have also noticed that there are companies out there that are not only selling counterfeit seals and gaskets, but valves as well – which is a much more serious matter. They are reverse-engineering components that they have no hand in developing so, in the short term, the parts are identical (as we have seen, sometimes down to the logo on the casing) but in the long term, if that part fails, it’s the customer who has the problem.
Because the part has been reverse-engineered, there will be no-one at that company that understands why the valve has been engineered in that way in the first place, there will be no spares network, and there will be no technical support – and you, the customer, will be stuck with failed valves, failed seals and a rapidly increasing set of bills.
We operate in a safety-critical industry that uses high-value products – so if anything goes wrong along the line, that safety is compromised and those valuable products go to waste. This is not a situation where we, as an industry, can afford to sit back and be complacent – this is dangerous.
We don’t manufacture seals and gaskets for the enormous profits – we do it because we want to support our products with the best accessories, enabling those products to perform in the way they have been designed to, with a long, trouble-free lifespan – anything less is a false economy.
What to do about the problem? It’s easy, stick with tried and trusted suppliers, if you do enter into a relationship with a company online, do some due diligence first – check if they have technical support, check if they have a spares network, check if all their claims stack up – because if you don’t, you will be the one footing the bill.
source: https://hcblive.com/equipment-spot-the-difference/
