Condition of Kingfisher frames

Wow! What a state they are in! For airframes not that old they are surprisingly tatty! If the paperwork trail is all over the place then yes it will be more economic to scrap!:apologetic:

Also criminal fraud and theft! Whilst it is not unusual for airlines to cannibalise parts from aircraft they own that wouldn’t be permitted with leased aircraft.

Some pictures

See the condition of non-flying frame/s:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5749323/

I suspect a logical purpose to the purposeful untruth.

Not disclosing the cannibalization.

I mean, the frames were leased. The lease agreements presumably required the lessee (Kingfisher) to keep the frames in returnable condition at lessee´s cost.

It makes perfect sense that if Kingfisher had financial trouble, then Kingfisher may have paid the lease price (not paying that would have been an obvious reason to seize the frames) but deferred the maintenance they were obliged to pay for. And cannibalized lessor´s property.

Activity presumably forbidden by lease agreements and grounds to return the frames – if the lessor found out.

Therefore the logical thing to do would have been to NOT log the cannibalization – so that the fact of cannibalization could only have been discovered by inspection of the actual frames. Whereas inspection of the maintenance logs should have contained nothing inconsistent with the cover story – that the flying frames still consist of their original parts or officially bought and logged spares, and these parts just happened not to break recently.

Whereas in underlying truth, parts of the flying frames did need replacement, and were replaced with parts from cannibalized frames – with no log created to attest to the fact of replacement, or which frame the replacement parts came from.

Does this make sense? There have been rumours of cannibalization and maintenance log falsification in other late airlines, including Pan Am… is the methodology described above SOP for financially distressed airlines?

I’d classify “purposely untrue” as a different matter altogether, and a question of the integrity of the engineer. I’d also question what oversight, if any, the DGAC had on Kingfisher, or the engineering provider that Kingfisher used.

As far as mismatch between paperwork and aircraft; it would be the tedious process of checking part numbers and serial number specified on the paperwork and going to the aircraft and physically checking what is fitted. There will be a log at some point of what was fitted to the aircraft. It is case of tracing steps, what paperwork is there, and what information you can glean from other sources; tech logs, work orders, etc.

It really depends on how complete and accurate the paperwork has been. Going by the article, it doesn’t look promising. And, why I am saying it is an expensive process to put right.

The worth of any aircraft is in the paperwork. If the paperwork is incomplete or missing, it is very expensive to get an aircraft flying again. If you can’t ascertain the history of a part, it would need to go for overhaul and have a new release certificate certifying if for use.

“Incomplete” or “missing”… where would you classify “purposefully untrue”?

And which frames are the bigger problem – the flying frames, or the grounded ones?

I mean… if a flying frame has paperwork which looks fine, and says every part is in place and is either an original or an officially bought replacement… but the paperwork is suspected to be deliberately false. Then some of the parts are not, in fact originals – they are cannibalized from some of the grounded frames. But since the said cannibalization officially, as per paperwork, did not happen, there is absolutely no papers which of the parts are in fact cannibalized replacement. And if you do identify a part which is not original and which instead is a replacement, the paperwork will also not tell you which specific of the 15 cannibalized frames it came from.

What is easier to discover during a thorough check of an airframe – missing parts on a grounded frame, or replaced and therefore undocumented parts on a frame that had been kept flying?

It still doesn’t tell you why they can’t be flown. A journalist isn’t going to understand why it can’t fly; just that it currently can’t be flown. I fail to see how “ravaged” for parts = beyond repair. Unless, they have removed parts with saws, unlikely…:rolleyes:

As I said in my previous reply, it is more than likely to be an incomplete paper trail rather than the planes not physically be able to be flown again.

It says in the linked article

“These lessors have discovered that aircraft parts have been so badly cannibalized that it is very difficult to restore the planes. In its last few months of operation (KFA stopped flying from October 1, 2012), the airline kept taking parts from its fleet to keep a handful of planes airworthy. Now the planes have been ravaged beyond repair and they can’t fly,”

The worth of any aircraft is in the paperwork. If the paperwork is incomplete or missing, it is very expensive to get an aircraft flying again. If you can’t ascertain the history of a part, it would need to go for overhaul and have a new release certificate certifying if for use. Multiply the amount of rotable parts on an aircraft and you can see why it gets expensive. Is it cheaper than writing of the debt and selling the aircraft as scrap, who knows?

Although, young A318s have been scrapped for their parts, if that is an indication of how much the parts are worth vs the airframe.

I wonder if in the future we will see the same happen to Lion Air?

Do you think everything put IN the flying frames was well-documented in logs, either?

What do you think happened to known broken parts taken out of flying frames and replaced with the cannibalized parts? Were the known broken parts carefully put in place into the grounded planes being cannibalized? Or were the broken parts thrown away, and left missing in the grounded frames?

If a part is attached to a plane in such a way that it remains usable when it is taken off and put into a new frame, what prevents the attachment of a brand new part to the cannibalized frame?

In theory, nothing. But you’re assuming that everything removed was well-documented in logs. This may not have been the case, so there’s simply no way of knowing what was taken from the aircraft.