serious incidents. The worst accident of all occurred in September 1989. The tail section of a turboprop plane tore loose, causing the plane to crash into the North Sea. All fifty-five people on board were killed. The cause was eventually traced to counterfeit bolts in the tail. It was never determined where they came from, because the repair station that installed them didn't have a parts and supplier registration system.
In 1990, Bruce Rice, the president of Rice Aircraft, a Long Island airplane parts distributor, was jailed for four years for stripping and replacing used parts and falsifying documents to suggest that they were new. Between 1977 and 1988, Rice sold counterfeit rivets and fasteners to Grumman, Air France, the Israeli Government, United Airlines, and American Airlines, among others, posing a serious safety threat to thousands of aircraft. Fortunately, no accidents were known to have resulted from the phony parts.
A few years ago, a company in Southern California was caught selling counterfeit parts to McDonnell Douglas. They were small devices that keep an airplane's landing gear from shaking, and were used on Douglas's DC-9 commercial airplanes. In 1995, in a separate incident, six hundred light planes were grounded after a supply of parts for Textron's Lycoming engines were discovered to be fake.
But there have been crashes involving Bell Helicopters in which the only thing truly Bell about the craft was the nameplate. The rest of it was rebuilt with scrap or counterfeit parts. In 1987, a traffic reporter riding in a helicopter was killed when the helicopter crashed while he was broadcasting live. It was determined that the accident was caused by a clutch made of counterfeit parts.
Who's to blame? A lot of people. And it's not enough just to make sure there's good paperwork on a part. Forgers can forge the paperwork. One of the best safeguards is to know your supplier.
A few years ago, undercover Congressional investigators paid a visit to a Miami scrap yard. They came across some jet engine blades marked with a red tag saying they were "unserviceable." But when the dealer saw they were interested in the blades, he removed the tag. He told them: "I know some of you boys rework these things, but that's not my concern." The blades sell for around $1,500 new. The investigators bought them for $1.30.
WHAT'S BEING DONE
Because of the sophistication and growth of counterfeit products, far more attention is being paid to preventing them, but a lot more needs to be done. Packaging is an essential ingredient in deterring counterfeiters, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, where bottles are reused by counterfeiters. I do a fair amount of work with drug companies, and I find that the best security is to combine overt with covert security features, features you can see with features you can't see.
The most common overt technique is the tamper seals common on over-the-counter medications. These days, that technology is being combined more and more with holograms. They're a very strong tool, and are widely used on closure seals and hang tags. They're even increasingly put on packaging to make a product more visibly vibrant. If you go to the toothpaste aisle at the supermarket, you'll notice that all the premium toothpastes have holographic packaging.
I like holograms, but the problem is that they're normally not registered. Anyone can go to a company in Taiwan and get a hologram duplicated. Often, they're silver foil with white screen printing on them. Counterfeit holograms are easy to slip through Customs. You can stuff enough fake holograms in a matchbox to put on ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars worth of counterfeit packages.
So a hologram is fine if it's in conjunction with another feature that you can't see. For instance, you could use a hologram combined with a covert feature like machine-readable information encrypted on the hologram. Other covert features include putting a fluorescent dot on the label of the packaging that's invisible to the naked eye and which can't be removed even by washing - you use a reader light to pick it up. There are also special coatings like microthin metals that change when slit or punctured. There is reactive invisible ink or visible coloring-changing inks. There are reactive threads that are woven into fabrics and emit a fluorescent color when put under a hand-held ultraviolet reader. There are scratch and view labels that reveal the words "original." And there is chemical tagging, for fuels, drugs, and pesticides. There's even a "biocode technology" where marker chemicals can