Aviation Runs on Paper Trails. One Man Proved They're Fiction.
A bolt that wouldn't fit during routine maintenance at a Portuguese airline in 2023 unraveled what Judge Simon Picken would later call a "more or less complete undermining of a regulatory framework designed to safeguard the millions of people who fly every day." Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, working from a garage in Surrey, had spent nearly five years flooding the global aviation supply chain with 60,000 fraudulent engine parts, forging documents on his laptop while inventing fake employees to sign them. On Monday, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for fraudulent trading, but the structural vulnerability he exposed remains unpatched.
The fraud worked because modern aviation safety operates on trust-based documentation that no one verifies until something physically breaks. Between January 2019 and December 2023, Zamora Yrala bought engine blades, bolts, and washers, then fabricated certificates about their source and condition using Microsoft Word. Customers received emails from fictitious sales managers and quality inspectors, roles Zamora Yrala played alone, signing documents with names that didn't exist. AOG Technics, his London-based company, generated £6.9 million in revenue during this period. Ninety percent of it came from fake parts.
The Supply Chain's Accountability Void
American Airlines lost £23 million to the scheme, engine repairs, replacement leasing, aircraft downtime, yet had never heard of AOG Technics. The airline didn't buy directly from Zamora Yrala's operation. It purchased through intermediaries, a standard practice in aviation parts distribution that creates layers of separation between end users and original suppliers. When investigators traced the provenance of compromised components, they found 28 American Airlines engines contained fraudulent parts. The carrier had no mechanism to detect this until regulators issued safety alerts on August 4, 2023, nearly five years after the fraud began.
This wasn't an oversight unique to American. Ryanair, Ethiopian Airlines, and TAP Air Portugal also flew aircraft with Zamora Yrala's parts installed. The affected components were linked to CFM56 engines, the workhorses of commercial aviation that power Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 fleets worldwide. CFM International describes the CFM56 as "the leading engine in commercial aircraft." That ubiquity meant a single fraudster's garage operation touched the backbone of global air travel.
The supply chain's opacity is structural, not accidental. Airlines rely on certified suppliers, who rely on distributors, who rely on brokers. Each transaction generates paperwork, certificates of conformity, airworthiness documents, maintenance records. Regulators designed this paper trail to ensure traceability. But the system assumes the documents are genuine. Zamora Yrala proved that assumption costs £53 million when it fails.
How the Fraud Stayed Hidden
No audit caught the scheme. No regulatory inspection flagged AOG Technics. The fraud ended because a mechanic in Portugal tried to install a bolt that physically wouldn't fit the engine mount. That mechanical incompatibility, metal refusing to mate with metal, triggered the investigation that revealed Zamora Yrala's invented employees, forged signatures, and fabricated quality certifications.
The detection method exposes the regulatory framework's practical limits. Aviation authorities in the UK, US, and EU issued coordinated safety alerts within hours of the Portuguese discovery, grounding planes and triggering emergency inspections across multiple continents. The response system worked efficiently once activated. But it required a tangible failure, a bolt's wrong threading, to activate at all. For nearly five years, the documentation passed every check because checking meant reading paperwork, and the paperwork looked correct.
GE Aerospace lost £3 million. Safran lost £580,000. These figures represent direct costs to manufacturers whose engine components entered the supply chain with falsified credentials. The broader industry damage, inspection costs, fleet groundings, schedule disruptions, remains harder to quantify but substantially exceeds the £53 million prosecutors cited.
The Security Theater Paradox
While 61,000 TSA screeners inspect passengers' shoes and confiscate water bottles, the turbine blades spinning those passengers through the sky enter aircraft through a verification process Zamora Yrala defeated with consumer software. This isn't a failure of diligence. It's a design choice embedded in how aviation regulation evolved. Passenger screening became visible, intensive, and physical after September 11, 2001. Supply chain verification remained documentary, distributed, and trust-based because the industry assumed sophisticated actors wouldn't risk criminal liability for relatively modest financial returns.
Zamora Yrala's operation disproved that assumption. His company's £6.9 million in fraudulent revenue over five years averages £1.38 million annually, a modest business by aviation industry standards, but apparently sufficient motivation to compromise the safety documentation for 60,000 parts. The Serious Fraud Office prosecuted the case at Southwark Crown Court, securing a guilty plea in December 2024. Judge Picken added an eight-year director ban to the prison sentence, prohibiting Zamora Yrala from managing UK companies until 2034.
What Confiscation Proceedings Won't Fix
Zamora Yrala faces additional confiscation proceedings aimed at compensating affected companies. CFM International, GE, and Safran sued him and AOG Technics at London's High Court in 2023, seeking to recover losses from fraudulent parts sales. These civil actions may return some money to victims. They won't address why American Airlines had no direct relationship with a critical parts supplier, or why aviation authorities lack real-time verification systems for component documentation, or why a garage operator could invent an entire quality assurance department without triggering regulatory scrutiny.
The structural problem persists because solving it would require rebuilding how the global aviation supply chain tracks parts provenance. Current systems assume paper certificates represent physical reality. Zamora Yrala's fraud demonstrated that assumption's fragility. His invented employees, sales managers and quality inspectors who existed only as email signatures, fooled customers because the regulatory framework never required proof that those people were real. It required only that the documents bore their signatures.
Aviation regulators now know a garage in Surrey can undermine their safety architecture for five years before a misfit bolt reveals the breach. The industry knows 60,000 suspect parts entered service before anyone noticed. Airlines know they can lose £23 million to a supplier they've never heard of.
What they don't yet know is how many other AOG Technics are operating right now, generating perfect paperwork for imperfect parts, waiting for the bolt that won't fit.