Original subtitles

High above the North Sea,

an aging propeller plane tumbles from the sky.

The first headline was sabotage.

Investigators consider a string of possibilities.

It takes two years to find the cause.

Unbelievable.

It's something that's never been seen in any previous investigation.

They looked at that and said, "Man, oh, man, how could that be?"

It would lead to arrests half a world away.

And call into question the safety of one of the world's most important planes,

Air Force One.

It reached all the way to the aviation that flies

around the President of the United States.

4:30 p.m., September the 8th 1989.

Oh, hang on, hang on.

Knut Tveitm and Finn Petter Berg are flying a charter flight

from Oslo, Norway,

to the German city of Hamburg.

Partnair 394, radar service terminated.

The plane is about 100 kilometers from the Danish Coast.

124 decimal 55 bye. Partnair 394.

How was dinner?

Delicious.

Little pricey, but delicious.

The two friends have flown around the world together,

including remote areas of Africa.

They're highly experienced

and both are only months away from retirement.

Copenhagen, good afternoon.

Partnair 394 maintaining flight level 2-2-0.

Partnair 394, good afternoon.

Radar contact Copenhagen control.

394.

The plane is flying 22,000 feet above the North Sea.

The aircraft they're flying is a twin-prop, Convair 340-580.

It's a popular plane for short routes like this one.

The plane has been chartered by the Norwegian shipping company, Wilhelmsen.

All 50 passengers are winners of a company lottery,

sending them on a free trip to Hamburg to name a new ship.

One of the company's best employees is chosen to give a speech

at the christening of the ship in Hamburg.

As the Convair crosses the North Sea, a Norwegian Air Force F-16

approaches the plane on its way home.

Whoa! Look at that, 11 o'clock.

F-16.

Suddenly, the plane experiences a violent shock.

The crew is caught by surprise.

The plane begins rolling upside down.

Air traffic control notices the Partnair 394

is off course and falling from the sky.

Partnair 394, Copenhagen control, please report new flight level.

The crew is struggling to save the plane and the lives of everyone on board.

Please report new flight level.

Pull up, terrain. Pull up, terrain. Pull up.

Please report new flight level.

Then it disappears.

It seems as though the charter flight has crashed into the sea.

Partnair 394 enroute to Hamburg is off radar.

Rescue teams race to the crash site,

nearly 20 kilometers north of the Danish Coast.

They find only wreckage and bodies.

All 55 people who were on the flight are dead.

The shipping company is devastated by the news.

Half the staff from its head office has been killed.

It's the biggest airline disaster in Norwegian history.

The nation is in shock.

Jan Ovind is a young reporter for Norway's largest newspaper.

He's assigned to cover this story.

One of the inspectors in the Norwegian FAA

jumped to the conclusion that it had to be sabotage.

And it was also stated by one of the Danish rescue team leaders,

who said that they had no distress call,

it just fell out of the sky.

Which meant it had to be a bomb or something.

And somebody draw links to Lockerbie, the year before.

In December 1988,

Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie Scotland.

The evidence in that case is pointing conclusively to a bomb.

Norwegian journalists uncover an intriguing fact

about the Partnair plane.

Our prime minister at the time,

Gro Harlem Brundtland,

she used the plane on her campaign trip

to the North of Norway,

and I guess she used it for two or three days.

And that was just two or three days before it crashed.

The nation wonders,

could the tragedy have been a botched assassination attempt?

The first headline was sabotage on the whole front page.

A bomb would explain the plane's sudden plunge from the sky.

Had the 55 people on board been the innocent victims of a murderer?

Investigators looking into the mysterious downing

of a passenger jet over the North Sea are facing a stunning possibility

that the plane was deliberately sabotaged.

I want maintenance logs...

The Norwegian Accident Investigation Board recruits

an Air Force investigator, Finn Heimdal, to join the team.

It will be a severe test of his investigative skills.

It's good to be here.

I started many, many years ago with the Air Force.

And, of course, I saw some investigations

mishandled terribly, and I thought it can be done better than that.

Investigators hear from several witnesses

who lend support to the idea that the plane was sabotaged.

A young man claims to have heard a cannon-like sound

coming from the crash site off the Danish Coast.

It may have been the explosion that brought down the Partnair plane.

Searchers scour the surface of the sea

for floating debris and for victims of the crash.

Eventually, all but five bodies are found.

They're taken to Denmark for autopsies.

Those examinations reveal that some of the victims

have small, puncture-like wounds.

This supports the notion that a bomb brought down Partnair Flight 394.

An autopsy on the First Officer also uncovers something unusual.

A complete, unbroken toothpick is discovered in his stomach.

That was a odd finding really because it was pointed at both ends

and how can you swallow a toothpick like that?

So he must have been exposed to a very shocking experience.

Please report new flight level.

But investigators can't confirm that a bomb brought down the plane.

They'll need to know more about the final moments of Flight 394.

Partnair 394 enroute to Hamburg is off radar.

Nine separate radar stations tracked its final seconds.

They could provide valuable clues.

The most intriguing readings come from a military radar station in Sweden.

Operators there tracked the Partnair flight as it crossed the North Sea.

Let's start at 14:36.

The military radar has detected something unexpected.

There is another object in the same airspace as the plane.

It is not another airplane.

It appears as Flight 394 started to plummet from 22,000 feet.

Any idea what it is?

We simply didn't know what it was from the beginning.

We had no idea what it could have been.

It took more than half an hour, something like 38 minutes

and the question was, what is light enough to fall that slowly,

and then solid enough to give radar returns like that?

Whatever the mysterious object was,

it now lies at the bottom of the sea.

A month after the crash, investigators are busy recovering sunken wreckage.

They've plotted the position of the wreckage on the ocean floor

using side scan sonar.

It sends out sound waves that are reflected back when they encounter objects.

The sonar equipment has painted

a remarkably accurate picture of the underwater wreckage.

It helps investigators see that the plane parts

have settled over a two kilometer-wide area.

It's an important piece of evidence.

It was evident that the aircraft had come apart in the air.

It hadn't hit the sea in one piece.

That was for sure.

The midair break-up suggests a bomb brought down the plane.

But it will take weeks to prove this.

In the meantime, investigators hope the plane's black boxes will provide

more immediate insight into the crash.

The plane's voice recorder and eventually it's data recorder

are recovered from the seabed,

and sent to labs for analysis.

Both boxes were damaged in the crash.

Investigators hope the damage to the boxes didn't affect the data.

Now let's see what we got.

The voice recorder may have picked up

a conversation between the pilots

that can explain what happened on board.

Avionics CVR?

On, as required.

Auto feather system?

Armed and two green...

The device usually records the final minutes of a flight.

But this CVR has done the opposite.

Engaged Beta lights off.

Power.

It recorded the start of the flight

but then mysteriously stopped recording just before the plane took off.

Well, it had recorded the conversation on the ground,

but as soon as the engines were up shifted the normal RPM for takeoff,

it ceased operations.

So that was a disappointment to us.

But the malfunctioning CVR did pick up an intriguing exchange between the two pilots.

How's the weather in Hamburg?

It's clear skies. Good visibility.

Hope it stays that way.

The CVR does tell investigators that Flight 394 began with an unusual problem.

Partnair was in financial dire straits, and we found out that just a few hours

before the plane took off,

the Norwegian aviation authorities sent out a telex

to tell all the airports in Norway to don't let a Partnair plane take-off

because they owe a lot of money in non-paid charges and fees.

They won't release us for takeoff until we pay the catering bill.

How much you got on ya?

Seriously?

God!

Probably enough actually.

Wow.

I'll take care of it then.

The First Officer was forced to leave the cockpit

to pay the caterers for on board meals.

Investigators check maintenance records

to find out why the CVR

only recorded the crew's conversation while they were on the ground.

They discovered that the plane's cockpit

voice recorder had been modified more than 10 years earlier.

Modified to switch to primary AC?

Beta lights out.

It was altered so that when the engines

were given full power for take-off...

Your power.

...the CVR would automatically switch from the plane's batteries to its generator.

And that modification was not working on this aircraft.

Neither pilot realized that as the engines were revved up for take-off,

power to the CVR was actually cut off.

Anytime you get key investigation components

such as the cockpit voice recorder

and Flight Data Recorder that don't work correctly,

it brings into question the thoroughness of the maintenance

and also the continued safe operation of the airplanes.

The malfunctioning voice recorder and the unpaid catering bill

lead investigators to look more closely at the history of the airplane,

and the company that owned it, Partnair Airlines.

Partnair operated a fleet of mostly older planes

that flew to Northern European destinations.

The Convair that crashed into the North Sea

was one of the airline's most recent acquisitions.

But the plane itself was 36 years old.

It had a complicated history of both ownership, and modifications.

The biggest change was to the plane's engines.

The really important modification was upgrading the engines to turbine engines.

On prop planes the propeller moves air backwards,

propelling the plane forward.

Early prop planes used piston engines to turn the propeller.

But turbine engines, which use a series of fans,

not pistons, to compress air, generate substantially more power.

Heimdal learns that in 1960, the plane's original piston engines were removed

and powerful new turbo-props were bolted to the wings.

It's a modification that provides more power but could pose a risk.

When there was a tremendous increase of horsepower,

installed in the turbine engines.

I was wondering what that was doing to the structure of the aircraft.

Heimdal has been placed in charge of analyzing the plane's engines.

He wants to know if the turbine engines

could have torn the aging plane apart.

I started asking the question,

how can an aircraft fly itself to pieces in mid-air.

The plane's Flight Data Recorders should tell investigators

about the operation of the engines in the moments before the crash.

The recorder from this flight is a primitive analog model.

It used a metal foil strip that rotated and some marking pens

actually scratched on the metal surface on the piece of metal.

The antiquated data recorder proves to be another frustration for investigators.

It didn't record many of the parameters it was supposed to.

But more mysteriously, the needle seems to have recorded

certain signals twice.

The double line confounds experts who analyze the device.

We had no experience with anything like that.

We contacted several experts, but none had experience with this before.

Yeah, I've never seen that before.

The flight data doesn't offer investigators

any immediate revelations about the crash.

Heimdal now wonders if the very fact

that the recorder was malfunctioning could be a clue in itself.

He decides to send the Flight Data Recorder

back to the American company that made it for further analysis.

Investigators painstakingly reconstruct the Partnair plane.

The Norwegian team recovered the airplane with assistance

from the local authorities, the Danish authorities I believe,

and decided to reconstruct the airplane.

A reconstruction is like putting together a puzzle that helps investigators

focus the investigation on areas that need to be looked at

and perhaps prioritize the investigation.

As the fuselage takes shape, the reconstructed plane

provides investigators with some stunning evidence.

The only thing that would destroy

the aircraft at cruising level would be an explosion.

So some of the parts looked maybe a bit suspicious.

Suspicious for what's on them.

There were rumors that it was found explosives at, in the Partnair plane.

There are traces of a powerful military explosive.

The amount is small, but the press gets wind of it.

The explosive residue could be from a bomb on board the plane,

or from another source.

A NATO war exercise called "Operation Sharp Spear"

was taking place that same day near the flight path of Flight 394.

One of the pilots I talked to, and he said, "I guess it might have been

"the so-called cold rocket, test rocket might have

"gone through one of the wings

"or the fuselage."

Many people now wonder if an errant warhead

played a role in bringing down the plane.

Pull Up. Terrain. Pull Up. Terrain.

Pull Up...

But when the explosive residue is analyzed,

it's found not to have been from a bomb or a warhead.

There simply isn't enough of it on the plane.

There was a small sign of explosives, but that was a very low level

and looked more like a contamination than anything else.

Many battles have been fought off the Danish Coast.

The sea is littered with old munitions.

Investigators believe the plane

picked up some explosive residue while lying on the ocean floor.

Explosives are ruled out as a cause of this crash.

Metallurgist, Terry Heaslip, has been brought in.

He examines the plane's reconstructed tail and makes a startling observation.

Pieces of the plane's skin show evidence of damage from over-heating.

Which means that it was flexing.

And you know, you take a coat hanger and you go like that, back and forth,

you hold it close to where it's going to break, and you'll burn your hand

because you develop heat where you're doing the fatiguing.

It's the same thing on an airplane.

The evidence is pointing to a problem with the plane's tail.

Investigators are keen to look at a massive generator

recovered from the rear of the aircraft.

The Auxiliary Power Unit is housed inside the Convair's rear fin.

It's a back-up power generator, that's usually only used

while the plane is on the ground.

Heimdal inspects the device and discovers

that some melted plastic parts from the plane's cabin

have found their way inside the APU's turbine.

It gives him an important new piece of information

about what was happening on the plane at the moment it failed.

Meaning that the cabin had failed when the APU was still operating.

The APU should not have been running while the plane was in the air.

The fact that it was means the APU could be behind this crash.

Investigators try to learn more about what happened on the day of the crash.

They interview the mechanic who inspected the plane that morning.

He reports that, one of the plane's two main generators wasn't working,

and that he wasn't able to repair it.

Regulations demand that the plane have two sources of power

before it's allowed to take off.

The First Officer comes up with a solution

that will allow the flight to leave.

He tells the airline that he will use the Auxiliary Power Unit

throughout the flight as a substitute for the malfunctioning main generator.

Okay. I want you to write this in the log book,

"Released for flight with APU generator operative."

We'll use the APU to power to the left side AC system.

APU is coming on.

Beta lights off.

Your power.

During his inspection of the APU, Heimdal makes an important discovery.

When I saw the part I saw, it was not an aircraft standard part at all.

It was made in a very primitive way by a piece of iron and welding it together

in a substandard way.

He notices that one of the mounts attaching the APU to the plane is broken.

The unit contains a rapidly spinning turbine that generates electricity.

If it wasn't properly held in place, it could have caused this crash.

Investigators need to know if the broken APU caused the crash.

They'll soon discover that it's just a piece of a much more troubling puzzle.

Investigators have discovered that Partnair Flight 394 was flying with a broken APU mount.

Metallurgist, Terry Heaslip, performs extensive testing

on the failed part.

My initial reaction was that the welding was bad,

was probably inappropriate.

Heaslip wants to know when the strut broke.

If it happened during the plane's last flight, it could explain the accident.

I could see the impact markings and the progression markings on it

that showed that it did not fail in a single overload

during this last accident flight.

The way the broken mount is worn down

also tells Heaslip that the mount holding the APU in place

didn't break on the day of the accident.

It was broken long before Flight 394 took off.

Investigators now need to know what effect the broken mount had on the flight.

40,000 RPMs.

Do a lot of damage.

The APU is a large gyroscope,

that's having a tremendous amount of energy in it

when it's rotating, and if that energy is

transmitted to the surroundings, the fuselage, the structure,

it could impact the whole vibration pattern in the tail.

Investigators want to know if anyone had felt vibrations

on this particular plane.

Interviews with people who flew on it provide some answers.

Listen, we appreciate your coming in.

Thanks a lot.

Now, you said you felt some rumbling on the plane?

Is that right?

One person stated that the plane that crashed vibrated far more

than the two other Convairs owned by the company.

Did anything seem unusual in the plane?

But others failed to mention the vibrations.

Had a good flight?

It's a puzzling situation.

Investigators know the APU mount was broken before the flight.

But they still don't know if it even played a role in the crash

or whether it would have affected the plane's tail.

Then the reconstruction begins to clear things up.

Heimdal discovers that two doors from the plane's tail have not been found.

When we reassembled the parts from the tail,

we saw that the rudder had been torn apart

in two major pieces and some parts were missing.

In particular, the doors between the fin and rudder were missing.

The shroud doors are two small doors located on the vertical fin of the plane.

They provide mechanics with access to weights inside the fin

that control the rudder's movement.

Heimdal makes a dramatic find about the doors themselves.

They were constructed with an aluminum honeycomb liner.

From his days in the Air Force,

Heimdal knows they have a unique property.

This is thin aluminum foil, as you know,

and it has the good reflective properties for radar

and it's very light.

The military use it to disturb radar signals. They call it chaff.

Investigators now realize that the unidentified object

picked up by Swedish radar was probably a piece of one of the shroud doors.

But when we connected the missing doors in the honeycomb with the radar data,

we knew that it had happened up at cruising altitude.

Because the slow falling object had come from very high level, cruising altitude practically.

Investigators conclude that the tail

began to break apart at 22,000 feet before it plummeted from the sky.

But why had the doors fallen off in mid-flight?

Whatever caused the shroud doors to tear off likely caused the crash.

Investigators know that the rudders counterweights

are located just inside the shroud doors.

If a rudder moves too violently from side to side, the weights do as well.

We found enough pieces to show that they were just pounding these doors.

And the first real components that came off

were the honeycomb in those doors.

Investigators conclude that around the time of the accident,

something caused the rudder to swing violently back and forth.

But they still don't know what.

The APU with the broken front shock mount on its own running in flight

would not cause the aircraft to come apart and the tail to come apart.

There had to be extra factors there for that to occur.

Investigators continue searching for those "extra factors" .

Then Partnair Airlines proposes one.

They point to the F-16 that passed over the plane

just minutes before the plane veered off course.

Whoa! Look at that, 11 o'clock.

F-16.

Partnair claims the military jet was flying faster

than it should have been.

They also believe that it came much closer

to the flight than officially reported.

Partnair, they contacted a Swedish investigator,

and he came out with the answer that the F-16 could probably

have gone through the sound barrier

as it passed just over the Partnair plane.

When a fighter jet or any other plane, breaks the sound barrier,

you have this pressure wave, and their theory was that

this pressure wave just got the plane to disintegrate in the air.

But the Norwegian F-16 pilot testifies that he was more than a 1000 feet

above the Convair when he passed it.

Investigators calculate just how close the F-16 would have had to be

in order to seriously disturb Flight 394.

They determine that for the F-16's pressure wave

to have affected the Convair, it would have had to fly

within a few meters of the plane.

There's no evidence the two planes were ever that close.

Okay, good work.

Ninety percent of the plane's wreckage

has been recovered from the sea.

But investigators still don't know

what caused the Convair's tail to come off in mid-air.

During the course of the investigation,

Finn Heimdal is given a promotion.

But he has no idea how to solve the puzzle that haunts his nation.

They asked me to be in charge

of the rest of the hardware investigation.

I was standing in a heap of a wrecked parts

and thinking I'll never get an end of this.

Investigators get a break when the faulty Flight Data Recorder

is analyzed in the United States.

The manufacturer has asked its top expert

to come out of retirement and examine the device.

The manufacturer, Fairchild, referred us to a previous employee...

and we found him in California.

The expert tells investigators that the needle that was supposed to be

recording the plane's altitude was shaking so much,

that it was leaving another mark on the foil.

But then he goes one step further.

The FDR has a capacity to record for hundreds of hours.

By un-spooling the metal foil completely,

he sees that the FDR has been vibrating severely for months.

We saw that this had happened

something like 360 operations hour before the accident.

I had never seen an abnormality like that before,

and it took us a while to figure out what was going on here.

It now seems the APU wasn't the only thing vibrating on this plane.

Investigators decide to chart the history of the vibrations chronologically.

They notice an unusual change in the pattern of vibrations.

Two months before the crash, the vibration suddenly stopped for a number of weeks.

Virtually no vibrations for 16 flights.

It was increasing intensity and frequency

up to the summer of '89

and then the pattern changed.

After getting better, the pattern of vibrations

got worse again, right up until the crash.

What happened here?

Investigators now need to find out what changed on the plane

during the two-week period when the vibrations stopped.

Why was it out of service?

Where was the work done?

The airline tells investigators that during that time,

the plane was receiving a major overhaul in Western Canada.

Thank you.

We'll be in touch.

The work was done by the plane's previous owner,

a Canadian company that specializes in servicing Convairs.

During the various test fights there,

the FDR recorded almost no excessive vibrations.

This healthy pattern continued on several passenger flights

once the overhaul was done and the plane returned to Norway.

Investigators review the maintenance records.

Heimdal finds that during the overhaul,

mechanics found signs of wear on one of the four bolts

that connect the vertical fin to the plane's tail.

These four bolts are the only things holding the tail to the fuselage.

During the overhaul of the Convair in July of 1989,

a mechanic replaced one of the four bolts.

The information from the Flight Data Recorder

reveals that the vibrations in the tail stopped right after

that one bolt was replaced.

Incredibly, investigators are able to recover all four of the bolts

which were holding the tail in place.

Terry Heaslip thoroughly analyzes the bolts.

He makes a final stunning discovery.

The three bolts that weren't replaced were not approved parts.

We did metallurgical testing, and we did mechanical testing.

And by doing all of these analyses,

we worked out that the three of the assemblies were not up the scratch.

They were bogus assemblies.

His analysis shows that the faulty bolts were incorrectly

heat-treated when they were made.

As a result, they are only sixty percent as strong as they should have been.

Investigators finally know why the tail was vibrating for months.

- You got something for me? - Mm-hmm.

Three of the bolts holding it in place were too weak.

They just weren't hard enough.

Unbelievable.

Three bolts holding the tail to the rest of the plane

were not authentic parts.

They were well-disguised fakes.

The week bolts mean investigators now must answer a critical question.

Why didn't the tail come off

in the previous 16 flights where it vibrated excessively?

Why this last flight?

Investigators already know that on the day of the accident flight,

a power generator wasn't working and that the pilots improvised a solution.

Okay, I want you to write this in the logbook, "Released for flight

"with APU generator operative."

We'll use the APU to power the left side AC system.

APU is coming on.

The pilots didn't realize that the APU mount was broken,

and the motor was vibrating considerably.

Their decision to run it throughout the flight made a bad situation worse.

The reason why things got bad on this particular flight is that the APU

was literally floating on two mounts instead of three.

This, along with the faulty bolts,

created even more vibrations in the tail of the plane.

And when you get the two of them shaking, if they ever get into sync,

what we call resonance with each other, disaster.

The investigators conclude that the vibrations in the tail

and the vibrations from the APU could have combined into a lethal force.

Now, this is what we got from the guys at MIT.

Technically, the vibrations could have torn the plane apart.

If the two loose items start to vibrate in the same frequency,

now you're going to get, or a multiple of that frequency,

you get what's called coupled harmonics.

And the one vibration is feeding the other one there, feeding each other

and making each other worse and worse.

The most famous example of coupled harmonics occurred

on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state in 1940.

The newly-built steel and concrete bridge

began swaying lengthwise, and then a cross-wind started dipping it

left to right.

The two vibrations moving in different directions combined to create a violent

twisting motion that tore the bridge apart.

Investigators calculate that the same effect tore apart Flight 394.

And we said, my gosh, that's exactly the phenomenon we have here.

This lethal combination of vibrations

caused the tail to sway back and forth so violently

that the rudder jammed to the left.

This forced the plane into a left turn so abrupt

that it increased airflow

over the right wing, creating greater lift and causing the aircraft to roll.

The plane recovered briefly, but the rudder jams to the left again,

and the shroud doors explode.

It rolls a second time, the tail begins to disintegrate.

After that, the crew didn't have a hope.

Investigators conclude that it was the three bogus bolts

that initiated the Partnair crash.

I looked at that and said, "Man, oh, man, how could that be?"

In a crucial component, a crucial fitting like that in the tail.

I couldn't believe it.

The report on Partnair Flight 394,

sends shock waves throughout the aviation industry.

It's the first time that a fatal plane crash

has been linked to unapproved spare parts.

It raises a frightening question.

How many of the parts being put into planes around the world are bogus?

The Partnair crash, that was the seminal event

that started people actually having

to recognize the unapproved parts problem and the fact that the worldwide

inventories of aircraft parts, in fact, were contaminated.

There are six million moving parts on a 747 alone.

The spare parts business is a 45 billion dollar industry.

And at the time of the crash, that industry was largely unregulated.

Mary Schiavo is the former Inspector General

of the Department of Transportation,

the agency that oversees the FAA.

No one knew how large the problem was.

They knew it was a problem because of a crash.

But how big was the problem in the United States? So we set out to measure it.

We started by auditing the FAA's own parts bins

and the FAA's own parts bins contained 39 percent bogus parts.

What we found is if the parts had come from parts broker,

which was a huge percentage of the parts supply industry,

95 percent of them were not authentic.

The FAA would soon find bogus parts on an airplane widely considered

to be the most secure plane on Earth.

There are 5,000 parts brokers in the United States, many of them in the Miami area.

Parts brokers had no regulation whatsoever.

You had a telephone and a fax, you were a parts broker.

Overnight, you could be in the parts brokerage business,

and you could get them anywhere you chose.

You could get them from junkyards.

You could get 'em from scrap facilities.

You could get 'em from old planes.

You could get 'em from crashes.

You could get 'em from people who were willing to manufacture

and don't care about the law.

Spare parts for airplanes are expensive.

A single bolt, like the one holding on the Partnair flight's

vertical fin can cost up to $250.

A bogus one can cost as little as $30.

Which makes it a bargain.

And when you have situations like you have today

and airlines are bottom-line driven,

and you've got eight or ten major airlines

in the United States, for example, that are on the verge of bankruptcy,

they're looking to cut costs.

The FAA launches a major investigation

into illegal parts, and uses sting operations to uncover unscrupulous dealers.

Investigators uncover a black market industry

that makes thousands of worn and inferior parts look brand new.

These are really good counterfeits.

It's very difficult to tell.

At the time of the Partnair accident, there were checks and balances

in the system that were supposed to keep bogus parts

from getting on major airlines.

For instance, each spare part needs someone's signature to verify its authenticity.

It has to have some documentation

that states that it's airworthy.

It has to have a maintenance release

by some certificated entity.

But investigators discover that in addition to a huge market in spare parts,

there's also a burgeoning market for counterfeit FAA tags.

We'd execute search warrants and find that people

had printed stacks of fake yellow tags,

and in many cases, they'd sign with a name

of an actual inspector, but they'd just forge the signature.

The tag in this business is worth more than the part.

At first investigators believe the problem is mostly with smaller airlines.

Smaller operators and repair stations are usually the people

who are most vulnerable to this after-market broker parts problem.

They're shocked when they discover that bogus parts have been found

on what is supposed to be the most tightly controlled plane in the world,

Air Force One.

It reached all the way to what many people considered

literally the highest levels of aviation.

The aviation that flies around the President of the United States.

Supposedly in an air-tight supply chain,

we had bogus parts cases that touched those aircraft.

The FAA responds quickly. More than a 100 dealers are arrested.

With every conviction, we were able to raise the level of awareness,

not only of the problem, but of the severe consequences.

If you want to risk somebody's life.

And I actually think that the most

important thing that we did was get criminal convictions.

As a result of their investigation, the FAA institutes

a much more rigorous system for documenting airplane parts.

They threaten airlines with criminal charges

if they knowingly accept bogus parts.

Things are different today, because we have a whole body of regulations,

much more than we had in the '80s and '90s even, to address the problem.

You have to get the mechanic who's actually got the wrench

in his hand to a point of sophistication

where he's knowledgeable enough

to smell a bad part.

To smell a bad piece of paper, and it is possible to do.

The new regulations achieved their goal.

In the two decades following the crash of Partnair 394,

there wasn't a single fatal accident attributed to bogus parts.

Years after the Partnair crash,

Finn Heimdal became the head of the Norwegian Accident Investigation Board.

Jimmy, my friend.

It was a major puzzle

that an aircraft, for no obvious reason,

could more or less disintegrate in mid-air.

His report into the accident resulted in major changes

that likely saved lives.

That's a positive thing.

But the negative, of course, is the tragedy,

the personal tragedy for many people.

One of the smallest parts

on a Norwegian charter plane, failed in 1989.

Because investigators found the cause of that accident,

passengers around the world are safer.

Less likely to be on a plane that's fitted with bogus parts.