When I read the AOG Technics story, I felt it on two levels.
I am a pilot. Not commercially, I fly because I love it. Every preflight walk-around I do, every component I visually inspect before I climb into the cockpit, I do with full awareness that what I am looking at had to come from somewhere. It had to be manufactured, certified, transferred, installed, and documented by a chain of human hands I will never meet. I trust that chain completely every time I take off. That trust is not blind faith. It is supposed to be backed by a system of verifiable records. Stories like AOG Technics is a stark reminder of what happens when that system fails.
In addition to being a pilot, I also spent decades at Lockheed Martin. I experienced first-hand how some of the most sophisticated supply chains operate. There is a level of extraordinary complexity on how parts are sourced across dozens of tiers of suppliers, and the components change hands through multiple organizations before reaching final assembly. Even in that environment, with all its rigor and process discipline, the foundational vulnerability was always the same: the physical part and its documentation were two separate objects. As the part moved through the process, the paperwork moved with it. Unfortunately, nothing permanently bound them together.
That is the architectural gap the AOG Technics scheme exploited. The physical parts existed. The documentation was fabricated. Because each physical component was not bound to an immutable digital identity at the point of manufacture, there was no mechanism to detect the disconnect until 60,000 suspect components had already entered the global aviation supply chain.
This is not a paperwork problem. It is a provenance architecture problem.
True chain of custody requires that the physical asset and its digital record be inseparable from origin through end of life. Every part must carry a bound digital identity established at the point it is manufactured, written into a tamper-resistant ledger that no single organization can alter after the fact. Every custody transfer must be appended to that ledger in real time. When a receiving technician scans a component, they should be reading verified, immutable history, not trusting a document someone handed them.
Combining digital documentation with IoT-enabled asset visibility makes this possible. Sensor-based visibility confirms a component’s physical location and captures custody transitions continuously. Immutable records ensure those transitions are permanently and independently verifiable. The physical asset and its digital record become one unified thread, not two objects that can be separated and manipulated independently.
At LocatorX, this is the IoT-based foundation that we built. We go beyond giving you the information to know where a part is. We capture the custody history and confirm that the physical asset in hand matches the digital record on file at every point across its lifecycle.
As a pilot, I need that guarantee every time I fly.
As someone who spent decades understanding the complexity of defense and aerospace supply chains from the inside, I know exactly how difficult it is to achieve and exactly how costly it is to ignore.
The CFM56 scheme succeeded because that binding did not exist. That gap is a solvable problem. One that mission-critical supply chains can no longer afford to leave open.
