DHS contractor pleads guilty

Ok, this is scary as hell. Jerry Edward Kuwata, formerly an executive with WECO Aerospace, which had repair contracts with DHS, and the City of Los Angeles plead guilty to "recklessly endangering the safety of an aircraft". He and several others were indicted in September of 2011, for failing to follow CMM and FAA regulations to repair aircraft parts.

According to the indictment, repairs were completed improperly, and customers were told that they were done to FAA standards. In one incident an employee allegedly used paperclips to repair a part, and told the customer that the repair had been done properly.

From what I can find out about them, they serviced generators, airspeed indicators, artificial horizons, directional gyros, encoding altimeters, horizontal situation indicators, and inverters/converters. Not like it was anything you actually needed to fly the plane safely.

He faces up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. I hope they throw the book at him.

www.nextgov.com...

Paperclips are actually pretty advanced. Macgyver would have done it with a bobby pin.

Sooner or later corners get cut.

Then the answer is inevitably more oversight.

Until that new overseeing body cuts a corner.

Then we call for yet further oversight.

Then that new overseeing body cuts a corner.

It's an inevitability and all the inspections, fines, alphabet agencies and prison sentences in the world wont change it. They'll make everything cost a lot more and restrict liberty but they wont end corner cutting.

How much "peraonal freedom" vs "regulation" do you think the aircraft industry should have??

reply to post by Aloysius the Gaul


Very little.

One of the biggest things we have to cut is the FAA being in bed with these airlines and contractors. I have heard so many stories where the FAA would pop in to an airline for a "surprise " inspection, where the airline knew a week ahead of time they were coming. I've also seen airlines with entire warehouses of parts that were against FAA regs for various reasons. They kept them off airport so that if the FAA really did pop in unannounced, they wouldn't find them, but they were still close enough to get easy access to.