In the space of six weeks, EASA has published two Suspected Unapproved Parts (SUP) notices that, read together, describe one of the most concerning supply-chain risk environments European aviation has seen since the AOG Technics affair. At the same time, almost-new Airbus A320neo-family aircraft are being torn down for their engines because spare powerplants are now worth more than entire airframes.
If you manage a CAMO, run a Part-145 organisation, sit in a compliance monitoring role, or hold accountability for goods inwards and procurement, the next paragraphs are written for you. The wider market backdrop matters too, so I have written this to be readable for anyone close to the industry — but the practical actions at the end are aimed squarely at the people who sign off on what gets installed on an aircraft.
What EASA Has Actually Published
EASA’s Suspected Unapproved Parts page is not a press feed. The agency uses it sparingly, and when two notices appear back to back, the underlying signal is worth reading carefully.
Theft of 625 + 9,740 turbofan parts in Spain (January 2026)
On 26 March 2026, EASA published a notice under reference OC-EASA-2026002221. The agency had been informed by Spain’s national aviation authority on 17 March that, in late January 2026, twelve containers of formally declared non-airworthy turbofan engine parts had been re-routed by a third party that impersonated the contracted mutilation provider.
The numbers are striking:
- 625 serialised parts, including engine critical and Life-Limited Parts (LLPs).
- Approximately 9,740 non-serialised parts — bearings, seals, blades, disks.
- Three of the twelve containers carried critical or LLP material that had not yet been mutilated.
- The components originate from the four most widely operated commercial turbofan families: CFM International CFM56, IAE V2500, Pratt & Whitney PW1100G and Rolls-Royce RB211.
- The engines in question power Airbus A320ceo, Airbus A320neo, Boeing 737NG and Boeing 757 fleets.
EASA’s assessment is unambiguous. Given the scale and the modus operandi, the agency considers it likely the parts may be offered on the open market and treats every item listed in the attachments as unapproved and ineligible for installation on an aircraft.
Theft of an RB211 Rear Mount, Support Bracket in the UK (April 2026)
On 14 April 2026, EASA published a separate notice. A Rolls-Royce RB211-535E4 rear mount support bracket — P/N UL17732, S/N CQYU794 — had been stolen on 12 April 2026 from a Part-145 organisation in Burnley, United Kingdom. The component was undergoing induction for overhaul. No maintenance, repair or overhaul work had been performed. No EASA Form 1 or UK CAA Form 1 had been issued.
That last detail is critical. The legitimate documentation for this serial number is, and remains, in the possession of the Burnley MRO. Any release certificate, 8130-3 or Form 1 that surfaces with this S/N attached is, by definition, fabricated.
These are not coincidental incidents. They are the visible part of a much larger market distortion, and to understand the risk to your operation you have to understand why anyone would bother stealing engine parts in the first place.
Why a Used Engine Is Suddenly Worth More Than a Six-Year-Old Aircraft
The Pratt & Whitney PW1000G geared turbofan family — the engine option chosen by a sizable portion of A320neo-family operators and by every A220 operator — has been plagued for more than two years by a powdered-metal contamination defect affecting high-pressure turbine and compressor disks. The defect mandates fleet-wide inspections and accelerated shop visits, and the maintenance network has not been able to keep up.
The downstream effect is unprecedented:
- According to Cirium data and trade reporting, roughly one-third of the GTF-powered Airbus fleet is in storage or grounded, against around 4% on CFM-powered variants.
- Industry analysis from late 2025 placed the number of grounded A320neo-family aircraft at approximately 635 worldwide.
- Engine shop visit wait times have stretched into the range of 250 to 300 days.
- A single in-service GTF engine has been reported to command lease rates near USD 200,000 per month in 2026.
The result is an economic inversion that is hard to overstate. An operator with a young A320neo on a short-term lease coming back to a lessor can, in some cases, recover more value by parting the aircraft out and leasing its engines and modules separately than by re-marketing the entire aircraft. By the end of 2025, at least 19 A320neo-family aircraft had already been parted out. A further wave is expected through 2026, partly fed by Spirit Airlines’ Chapter 11 process, with EirTrade Aviation, RESIDCO and KP Aviation among those reported to be dismantling ex-Spirit aircraft less than five years old. Two A320neos that entered service in December 2021 and July 2022 were sold for break-up in February 2026 — the youngest twin-jet aircraft ever retired for that purpose.
Tristan Brouard of ACC Aviation has described this as a cyclical distortion rather than a structural redefinition of the asset class, and that is almost certainly correct. The GTF Advantage achieved EASA certification in April 2026, Pratt & Whitney reports that the population of grounded GTF aircraft is down roughly 15% versus end of 2024, and heavy shop visit turnaround times have improved by around 20%. The market will normalise.
But while the market distortion is temporary, every consequence of a non-conforming part installed on an aircraft during this period will be permanent. That is the gap criminals are exploiting.
Why "AOG Technics" Should Still Be in Every CAMO’s Vocabulary
The reason regulators and lessors are taking the 2026 thefts seriously is that the industry has already lived through what happens when fraudulent engine paperwork enters the supply chain at scale.
Between 2019 and 2023, UK-registered distributor AOG Technics is alleged to have supplied around 60,000 parts with falsified Authorised Release Certificates into the global CFM56 and CF6 networks. In October 2023, CFM International stated that 126 engines were suspected of containing falsely documented AOG-supplied parts. Affected operators included Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, Southwest, Ryanair, TAP, WestJet and Virgin Australia. The UK Serious Fraud Office has estimated the disruption cost the industry around USD 53 million, mainly through unscheduled inspections and groundings — even though no in-service accident was ultimately attributed to AOG-supplied parts. In late 2025, AOG Technics’ director was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment by a UK criminal court.
The AOG Technics affair taught the industry two uncomfortable lessons:
- A determined distributor can introduce bogus paperwork into the global engine supply chain faster than approved organisations can detect it.
- Even when no accident occurs, the cleanup cost — engine teardowns, ferry flights, mass inspections, lost revenue, insurance disputes — runs into the tens of millions of dollars per case.
The January and April 2026 EASA SUP notices arrive against that backdrop, in a market where the financial incentive to launder stolen parts into the system is materially higher than it was three years ago. That is the dangerous combination.
Bogus, Counterfeit, Suspected Unapproved — and Why the Distinction Matters
These terms are used loosely in the press. Under the EASA framework, they are not interchangeable.
A Suspected Unapproved Part (SUP) is any part whose conformity with applicable airworthiness data is in doubt. A part can be a SUP because it was never released to service, because its release certificate is suspected of being falsified, because it has been altered or repaired outside an approved organisation, or because its identity cannot be verified.
A counterfeit part is a part deliberately misrepresented as approved when it is not — a sub-category of SUP that involves intentional fraud.
A bogus part is industry shorthand for any of the above and carries no specific regulatory meaning.
The Spanish theft falls squarely into the SUP category. The components were declared non-airworthy and were on their way to mutilation precisely because they were no longer eligible for installation. A high-pressure turbine blade approaching the end of its life-limit is not safe to put back into an engine simply because someone re-stamps a cycle count. That is exactly why mutilation exists.
The Burnley theft sits at the boundary between SUP and counterfeit. The bracket itself has documented identity, but any release certificate that turns up with it on the open market must be fabricated.
Operationally, your goods inwards procedure should treat all three categories identically — quarantine, investigate, report. The interesting question is what your compliance monitoring programme is doing to stop any of them from arriving at your stores in the first place.
What CAMOs, Part-145 Organisations and Operators Should Be Doing This Week
There is a difference between being aware of the EASA notices and operationalising them. The following is a practical checklist that maps directly to the compliance monitoring programme and the procurement and goods inwards process.
1. Cross-reference the EASA serial-number lists immediately. The attachments to OC-EASA-2026002221 list every serialised part number and serial number from the Spanish theft. The 14 April 2026 notice lists the single Burnley S/N. Both lists should be circulated, in writing, to goods inwards, procurement, CAMO planning and engineering, the Compliance Monitoring Manager, and every approved supplier in your network.
2. Audit your supplier base now. Review your approved supplier list, particularly any distributor brought into the supply chain in the past 24 months. Look for missing audit reports, no on-site visits, parts sourced "out of channel," unusually short lead times, or pricing that is materially below the prevailing market.
3. Treat every "too good to be true" offer as a SUP indicator. Given current GTF and LLP scarcity, a part offered at a steep discount, with shorter-than-normal lead time, or from a previously unknown broker should trigger a SUP risk assessment before purchase, not after.
4. Use ECCAIRS 2 for any discovery or any suspicious offer. Every EASA SUP notice asks for this explicitly. Reporting also satisfies the occurrence reporting obligation under your competent authority’s regulation and feeds the European safety data picture.
5. Refresh training for goods inwards, stores, procurement and engineering. SUP recognition, AOG Technics, and the 2026 EASA notices should be in continuation training this year. Compliance monitoring audits should sample actual procurement transactions from the past six months, not only inspect the procedure document on the shelf.
6. Document the audit trail. If a stolen part ever does end up in your inventory, the regulator will ask three questions: how did it enter, who released it, and what evidence do you have that your processes were applied correctly. The answer needs to be in the records, not in someone’s memory.
A Cyclical Market, A Permanent Safety Reality
The analysts are right when they describe the engine-value inversion as a cyclical distortion. The GTF Advantage is now certified, the grounded GTF fleet is shrinking, and the wider market will normalise as the engine maintenance backlog clears between now and 2028.
But while the distortion is cyclical, the safety consequence of a single stolen, mis-documented, or unmutilated part installed on an engine is not. The reason EASA mandates mutilation of non-airworthy parts, the reason Form 1 traceability exists, the reason Part-21G approves the production and distribution chain, is that the airworthiness system only works if every link holds. The 2026 wave of engine-parts theft, and the parallel teardown of nearly new aircraft for their engines, is the signal that criminal actors understand exactly how that chain works — and exactly where the gaps are.
For European CAMOs, Part-145 organisations and operators, the implication is simple. While the market is distorted, compliance monitoring oversight has to be sharper, not softer. Procurement discipline has to be tightened, not relaxed in pursuit of available parts. Continuation training has to address SUP risk explicitly. And every approved supplier in your network deserves a fresh look this quarter.
The criminals have already read the market. The question is whether your organisation has read the EASA notices, and whether it is prepared to act on them before the next one is published.
The article describes a real, present-day, documented threat — and the regulatory framework that prevents it from reaching the aircraft already exists. EASA Part-145 §145.A.42 sets out exactly the controls that the two thefts attempted to circumvent: component classification, material certification, supplier evaluation, incoming physical inspection, material quarantine and the handling of unapproved parts. AT-0010-00 Stores and Incoming Inspection is the structured training for the people in your organisation who apply that framework day to day.
