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Quick summary

An Authorised Release Certificate — EASA Form 1, FAA Form 8130-3, CAA Form 1, TCCA Form One — is the only document that tells you whether a component is eligible for installation. If your airline has no in-house CAMO, because continuing airworthiness is contracted out or your fleet sits under a lighter regime, the person who catches a bad certificate is usually the buyer or the stores clerk, not an airworthiness engineer. This guide sets out what to read on the form, in what order, and what to do when something does not add up.

Why this stopped being a paperwork exercise

On 23 February 2026 Southwark Crown Court in London sentenced Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, director of AOG Technics Limited, to four years and eight months in prison after a UK Serious Fraud Office investigation. The company had distributed roughly 60,000 engine parts accompanied by forged Authorised Release Certificates — both EASA Form 1 and FAA 8130-3 — between January 2019 and July 2023. Losses to airlines and manufacturers were put at more than £39.3 million.

Two details from that case matter more than the headline number.

The first is who was hit. Delta, American, Southwest, TAP, Ryanair, WestJet, Virgin Australia and Ethiopian Airlines all appear in the reporting. This was not a scam that only reached under-resourced operators. It reached carriers with full engineering departments, and it reached them for four years.

The second is what was sold. The parts were overwhelmingly CFM56 hardware for the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 — and mostly non-serialised commodity items: bolts, nuts, washers, dampers, seals and bushings. Nobody builds a receiving-inspection process around a bag of washers. That is exactly why the paperwork on cheap items deserves the same reading as the paperwork on a landing gear.

If you operate CFM56-powered aircraft in Africa or South Asia, the platform overlap is direct. We covered the wider support picture for those fleets in our guide to 737 Classic and CFM56-3 parts support in Africa.

What the certificate is — and what it is not

Read the small print on the form itself. Three limits are printed there and they are routinely misunderstood:

• It is not a shipping document. The EASA completion instructions state plainly that the certificate is not a delivery or shipping note. The FAA guidance says the same of Form 8130-3. A form that arrives functioning as a packing list is a warning sign about the seller’s process.
• It is not installation approval. The form “does not constitute approval to install the item on a particular aircraft, engine, or propeller”. Eligibility against your effectivity, your modification standard and your applicable service bulletins is a separate check you still have to make.
• It is not a certificate of quality or a warranty. It records what an approved organisation did and under which rule it released the item. That is all.

The user or installer clause — the sentence written for you

The block of capitals at the foot of an EASA Form 1 carries the obligation that falls squarely on an operator without its own airworthiness office:

“Where the user/installer performs work in accordance with regulations of an airworthiness authority different than the airworthiness authority specified in block 1, it is essential that the user/installer ensures that his/her airworthiness authority accepts items from the airworthiness authority specified in block 1.”

In practice: a valid EASA Form 1 is a valid EASA Form 1. Whether your national authority accepts it is a different question, answered by the bilateral agreement or working arrangement between your authority and the one named in block 1. The UK CAA publishes acceptance tables that differ by component condition, country of origin and date of issue, and warns that the tables are reference only — the current bilateral text governs. Ask your regulator, in writing, which release documents it accepts for your fleet, and keep the answer on file. It is a one-off question that settles hundreds of future purchases.

The same form also states that blocks 13a and 14a do not constitute installation certification, and that the aircraft maintenance records must contain a separate installation certification issued under national rules before the aircraft may fly.

Reading the form: eight blocks that decide acceptance

EASA Form 1 and FAA Form 8130-3 are harmonised block for block, so one reading order works for both.

Block	What it says	What to check
1	Approving competent authority / country	Is this authority accepted by your regulator for this component condition? See the clause above.
3	Form tracking number	Unique to the issuing organisation. This is the reference you quote when you verify the form with them.
4	Organisation name and address	Must be the approved production or maintenance organisation that did the work — not the trader who sold it to you.
7, 8, 10	Description, part number, serial number	Must match the item, its tag and its packaging exactly. “N/A” is correct in block 10 only where no serial number is required.
11	Status / work	One entry only. On the maintenance form: Overhauled, Repaired, Inspected/Tested or Modified. On the production form: NEW or PROTOTYPE.
12	Remarks	The block that carries the airworthiness argument. Details below.
13a	Certificate of conformity — production only	Two mutually exclusive options: approved design data, or non-approved design data specified in block 12. Mixing both on one certificate is prohibited.
14a	Release to service — maintenance only	At least one regulation box must be marked: Part-M Subpart F, Part-CAO, Part-145, or other regulation specified in block 12.

Block 12 is where thin paperwork gives itself away

Block 12 must describe the work in block 11 in enough detail for the user or installer to determine airworthiness. The EASA completion instructions are explicit that a bare statement such as “in accordance with the CMM” is not acceptable without specifics. What you should expect to see, depending on the item:

• The maintenance data used, with revision status and reference
• Compliance status against applicable airworthiness directives and service bulletins
• Repairs and modifications embodied, and replacement parts installed
• Life-limited parts status, and shelf-life limitations where they apply
• Any deviation from the customer work order
• Non-destructive testing methods used
• Traceability references such as batch numbers
• Where an item is released as PROTOTYPE, the statement “NOT ELIGIBLE FOR INSTALLATION ON IN-SERVICE TYPE-CERTIFICATED AIRCRAFT”

If block 12 says “None” on an overhauled rotable, that is not a tidy form. That is a form that has not told you anything.

Dual release

A dual release is a single 8130-3 covering work carried out under both FAA and EASA rules. It is not a tick box — it lives in block 12, in wording along the lines of: work carried out in accordance with EASA Part-145, and in respect of that work the article is considered ready for release to service under EASA Part-145 approval number [number]. If the seller tells you a component is dual released and block 12 carries no such statement and no EASA approval number, it is not dual released.

New parts: when there is no release certificate at all

A missing 8130-3 on a new part is not automatically a problem. The FAA does not require Form 8130-3 for domestic use; a manufacturer’s certificate of conformity, packing list or shipping document may be used to transfer a new article, and the form is optional for that purpose. What is not optional: only authorised persons may issue an 8130-3 — FAA aviation safety inspectors, designees with the right function codes, ODA-authorised persons and certificated organisations such as production approval holders, repair stations and air carriers.

A distributor or reseller cannot issue an Authorised Release Certificate. If a trading company’s own name sits in block 4 as the releasing organisation, stop there and ask for the original document from the organisation that actually did the work.

Forgery red flags you can see without an engineer

Regulators have published concrete descriptions of what falsified forms looked like. In FAA Unapproved Parts Notification 2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713 (21 September 2023), covering GE bushing P/N 1856M94P01 for the CF6 engine, the counterfeit FAA Forms 8130-3 shared a set of visible defects:

• The part description did not match the manufacturer’s own wording — “Bushing” instead of “BUSHING SHRD (IGV)”
• The User/Installer Responsibilities section was missing entirely
• Non-standard formatting, including bold fonts through blocks 6 to 13e
• Blocks 14a to 14e were not greyed out as they are on the manufacturer’s genuine forms

None of that requires a Part-145 qualification to spot. It requires one genuine form from the same organisation to compare against — which is why keeping a reference file of known-good certificates from your regular suppliers is worth the hour it takes to build.

Verification: the step almost nobody takes

Transport Canada’s Civil Aviation Safety Alert CASA 2023-05 (19 October 2023) on AOG Technics states the point directly: “Confirmation from the approved organization identified on the ARC may be required to ensure that they did in fact manufacture or maintain the part.”

That is a phone call or an email to the organisation named in block 4, quoting the tracking number in block 3. Approved organisations are used to this request and answer it. Make it standard for any first purchase from a new supplier, for any serialised rotable, and for any price that looks better than it should.

When the paperwork fails

The same Transport Canada alert sets out what to do, and it is worth following whatever your jurisdiction: affected parts found in inventory “should not be sold, distributed or installed on an aeronautical product and should be quarantined as unairworthy parts until a determination can be made regarding their eligibility for installation.” Where a part with a falsified certificate is already fitted, it should be replaced with an approved part.

Three things follow from that, and all three are commonly got wrong:

• Quarantine, do not return to stock. A suspect part put back on the shelf will be issued again by someone who was not in the conversation.
• Do not return it to the seller quietly. A refund closes your problem and reopens it for the next operator.
• Report it. Every one of the AOG Technics alerts existed because someone reported a doubt — in that case a TAP Air Portugal engineer who asked the manufacturer to confirm the origin of a part, and was told the documents were fake.

A receiving routine for an operator without a CAMO

Ten minutes per line item, applied consistently, closes most of the exposure:

• Check block 1 against your regulator’s accepted list, once per authority, then reuse the answer
• Confirm block 4 is an approved organisation, not the trader you bought from
• Match description, part number and serial number to the item, the tag and the box — all three
• Read block 11 and block 12 together: does the remark actually describe the work claimed?
• Confirm the correct signature block is completed — 13a for production, 14a for maintenance — with an authorisation number in 14c
• For anything dual released, find the EASA approval number in block 12 or treat it as FAA release only
• Verify the form with the issuing organisation on first purchase, on serialised rotables, and whenever the price is unusually good
• File the certificate with the aircraft records, and issue the separate installation certification your national rules require

Documentation problems and customs problems tend to arrive together on cross-border purchases. Our guide to importing aircraft parts into Africa covers the customs side, and the article on currency controls in Nigeria, Egypt and Ethiopia covers the payment side.

Buying so the paperwork is right the first time

Most bad certificates enter through the same door: an urgent requirement, an unknown seller found under time pressure, and a price that removes the urge to ask questions. The defence is structural rather than clever — buy from sellers whose identity and approvals are established before the AOG starts, and settle through a mechanism that does not release money until the item and its documents have been accepted.

On Aviatrading, sellers are verified and every transaction is protected by escrow, so payment is released after the deal closes rather than before the paperwork has been read. You can post an RFQ with the part number and the release standard you require, browse the parts catalogue by platform and category, or follow live requirements on our Telegram channel.

Sources

• Aerospace Global News and AeroTime, February 2026 — AOG Technics sentencing at Southwark Crown Court, UK Serious Fraud Office investigation, affected carriers
• Simple Flying — scale of the AOG Technics fraud, 60,000 parts and forged release certificates
• EASA Form 1 completion instructions — block-by-block requirements, block 11 status options, block 12 content, blocks 13a and 14a, user/installer responsibilities
• FAA, Authorized Release Certificate FAA Form 8130-3 questions and answers — new parts, certificates of conformity, dual release wording, who may issue the form
• FAA Unapproved Parts Notification 2023-AAE-EHL-20230801-713, 21 September 2023 — documented characteristics of falsified 8130-3 forms
• Transport Canada Civil Aviation Safety Alert CASA 2023-05, 19 October 2023 — verification with the issuing organisation, quarantine and replacement
• UK Civil Aviation Authority, Guidance on acceptance of components — acceptance by origin, condition and bilateral arrangement