On the same day a The helicopter separated and crashed into the Hudson riverKilling All on board, a great federal jury in Los Angeles officially accused a local helicopter repair company of putting its customers at similar risks.
Federal prosecutors say that for more than three years, Jared Michael Swensen, 48, of Ventura, Aircraft parts distributed and sold It was approaching the end of their service life, but listed them as new. A failure of this equipment could have led to a fatal helicopter accident, prosecutors said.
The helicopter parts installed on customer planes were listed as having a few hundred hours of service or in some cases being brand new, while in reality the documents were closer to the end of their service limit, according to the accusation act.
Swensen has operated his business, Light Helicopter Depot, outside of Oxnard airport. He announced that it had been certified with a certificate of cell and power plant with authorization to inspection the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We specialize in receiving older and timed aircraft,” said the company on a website now deleted announcing its services.
But in reality, the prosecutors say that Swensen and his company made falsified registrations on the maintenance edge newspapers and modified the sales orders and the packaging slips to correspond to falsified entries. The company is also accused of falsification of the Liberation certificates of the Federal Aviation Administration, used to show that a plane is in navigation.
Two times, SWENSEN and his business billed his customers for his service, including an invoice for $ 13,000 and another for $ 23,700, according to the judicial archives.
The US office of the Inspector General Ministry of Transport investigated the case and the FAA attended.
If it is convicted, Swensen could incur up to 20 years in prison for each chief of fraud per thread and up to 15 years in prison for each fraud chief involving plane documents. According to prosecutors.
Swensen has not yet pleaded in response to the accusations, according to the judicial archives.