Did you know there is a major and well-established industry for counterfeit airplane parts?

The same kind of industry that churns out fake designer bags, pirated DVDs and fraudulent high-fashion clothing makes low-cost counterfeit airplane parts.  This is serious stuff.   Most of us do not really care if the pseudo-Rolex watch that we once bought for $10 falls apart after three weeks, but we sure do care that some civilian airlines (and military hardware) are equipped with potentially dodgy mechanical parts.

In all the discussion of the Malaysian flight MH370 I have seen little serious analysis about this issue.  I have read and seen innumerable mainstream media stories about grieving families, the wonderful technical capacities of Boeing planes, the purported flight path over the Indian Ocean and reams and reams of speculative nonsense.

My personal favourite are the news reports about the purported “suspicious” activities of the pilot. Some coy twerp of a journalist comes on my screen and says things like,

“The pilot had a flight simulator. It seems he used it to practice emergency landings on remote airfields near his regular flight path. The FBI are now examining this lead.”

[Subtext translation: “Mad pilot – no one to blame here, except one crazy employee”].

The response of any normal person is to think,

“Crikey, the pilot sounds great!  I want my planes to be flown by a person so dedicated and responsible that in his off-hours he practices emergency landings.”

However, for all the speculation, all the nonsense and all the twitterings in the mainstream media, I have yet to hear or see a thoroughly responsible and good investigation into the counterfeit airplane parts industry and its potential link to the MH370 disappearance.

I am not suggesting that a counterfeit engine part is necessarily the answer to why a modern, well-maintained (we hope, but again, we have not seen the maintenance/repair logs) jetliner mysteriously disappears.  However, I do want to point out that, once again, the mainstream media and its orthodox journalists have mostly failed – despite enormous amounts of resources – to bring you a potentially important aspect of a story.

For all the regular readers who use this blog to check up on the fight against match-fixing, you may be wondering if there is a connection?

Yep, here it is.

To review:

Singapore and Malaysian football is deeply corrupted.  It is suffused with match-fixing.  Not every game, nor every team, but fixing scandals occur so frequently that no one is surprised when they do occur.

Here is the second important truth:

Many of the people who fixed football matches Malaysia and Singapore have gone around the world and fixed games in dozens of different countries, leagues.

Repeat – much of the reason why “match-fixing is not limited to Malaysia and Singapore” is because of Malaysian and Singaporeans fixers.

Why is this important?

Because if you want to stop match-fixing in your own league, you have to stop it in its two principle source countries of Malaysia and Singapore.

All this begs the question – why do few other people say the things that you read on this site?

There are – now – dozens of match-fixing experts, consultants and journalists who write reports of varying quality about the problem.  Yet few of them will stand up and publicly say,

“Get the Asians to arrest their match-fixers and put them on a public trial so we can solve (for now) much of this problem.”

It is a little like the counterfeit airplane parts non-discussion.  There is a systemic aspect to this question.   Just as counterfeit parts is an issue that few inside the airline industry want to discuss publicly.   So too coming up with realistic solutions to solving match-fixing is not what the anti-match-fixing industry wants to do.   If you could solve the issue cheaply by arresting and putting on public trial the gangs of fixers (and some of the prominent people who finance their industry) it would stop the flow of cash into the anti-match-fixing industry: all the grants, all the research monies, all the international conferences would stop.

The worst offender is Interpol.  This is the same organization that has had such wonderful success in their War on Drugs and against DVD Piracy.   They are applying their same dreadful techniques to their war against match-fixing.  In other words, they are not saying what needs to be said.   Instead they are hosting innumerable conferences around the world with (mostly) non-expert experts who trot out and speak nonsense.

For example, we hear an interminable discussion about “educating the players on the ethics of match-fixing”.  The joke is that the people teaching “ethics” to the players will be, most likely, from FIFA, their national football federation or some other ethically-challenged organization.   So you will have – mostly – well-paid, morally-ambiguous “experts” teaching – mostly – impoverished young athletes about right and wrong.

What is the link to the mainstream media?   Well, again like the non-discussion of the counterfeit airplanes parts, most journalists (but not all) have been swayed by an internal industry agenda.  Rather than seeing the current wave of match-fixing as a relatively easy process to stop, they have been influenced to describe it as complicated process far too difficult to stop.

The message is simple: go arrest the Asian fixers, put them on trial so the world can find their rich, politically-connected backers.  The problem can be stopped for the next few years and we can start focusing on real life and death issues – like the counterfeit airplane parts industry.