Word: unknowns
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...computer printout that clearly indicated the NTSB did not agree. Page after dense page described accidents the NTSB tied to counterfeit parts. For instance, in 1990 a Pan Am Express flight crashed when its nose landing gear jammed "due to the installation of a bogus part by unknown persons...
...regulate by counting tombstones," an FAA official told a journalist a few years ago. The nickname's origins are unknown, but by the time I joined the Department of Transportation, even people who worked for the FAA cynically called it the Tombstone Agency. Within the Washington Beltway, agency officials, government bureaucrats, staff on Capitol Hill, aviation lobbyists, airline representatives and journalists all understood the poignant irony of this nickname. The FAA will not do anything until people die. It was a sad, bad, inside joke. Only the public never knew how much truth...
...only a few hundred reports of bogus parts. Nevertheless, I knew each report could represent thousands of parts. The number of brokers, on the other hand, is unknown. The FAA says 2,000 to 5,000; some aviation-industry estimates put the number at 20,000. Nobody knows, because brokers are unlicensed, unregistered, untrained--and ungoverned by the FAA. They are the broken link in the FAA's regulatory chain. We found that bad brokers would simply close up shop, move to another building or town, and resume business under a new name...
...warning lights, landing gears, wheels, combustion liners, parts of helicopter tail rotors, windshields and entire wing and tail assemblies. We would confiscate parts made in basements, garages and weld shops, or from major U.S. manufacturers and from Germany, France, England, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, China, the Philippines, Taiwan or unknown countries. They even showed up on the President's helicopters and in the oxygen and fire-extinguishing systems of Air Force...
...have their hymens reconstituted in private French clinics; others go to cities in Tunisia, Algeria, or Morocco, where the procedure is even more common, and costs as little as $300. Though the number of Muslim women in the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, and France undergoing the procedure is unknown, there's a consensus among doctors that hymenoplasty is increasingly common. Ironically, as some commentators note, the increase in the procedure reflects the growing emancipation of women from tradition-rooted communities, but also the ongoing male oppression signified by the obsession with female virginity...