United States District Judge John A. Mendez sentenced Jerry Edward Kuwata, the former operations manager at Weco Aerospace Systems, to one year in prison for conspiring with others to conceal facts from customers and the FAA about Weco's fraudulent aircraft repairs between October 2006 and February 2008. Weco was an FAA-certified repair business with facilities in Lincoln and Burbank, Calif., and was authorized to work on certain types of aircraft parts, including starter generators and converters.
According to court records, Weco employees regularly failed to follow FAA regulations in repairing and overhauling the aircraft parts. In many cases, Weco did not even have equipment capable of performing required tests. Weco employees at both locations nonetheless performed repairs and returned parts to customers, falsely certifying that the parts had passed tests and had been repaired in accordance with FAA standards.
There have been no known instances in which a fraudulent Weco repair resulted in an aircraft accident. However, Weco customers who testified at the trial of Weco’s owner, William Hugh Weygandt, consistently testified that once they learned of the fraudulent repairs, they removed all Weco-repaired parts from their aircraft to address safety concerns. A federal jury found Weygandt guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud involving aircraft parts repair, and last July he was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. Other former Weco executives Michael Dennis Maupin and Anthony Vincent Zito previously pleaded guilty to federal offenses in connection with the conspiracy. They are awaiting sentencing.
