United Is Latest to Discover Bogus Parts in Plane Engines

Merkel trees with restricted access are probably the more applicable notion here.

E.g., what most Free Software development uses.

I like how OP jumps from “highly regulated world of aircraft” to a solution with zero regulation.

Imagine being on a sinking ship and the captain is all; don’t worry, if we tie this life jacket to the handrail, it’ll stop the descent by floating on top of the water.

IT has been taken over by the rent seeking industrial complex. Peddling hallucination to prop up book sales and conference travel.

Blockchains can be public or private (i.e. restricted access). In this case, the latter would be appropriate. There are also ways of signing records to establish that a known company produced them.

The idea behind using blockchain for tracking provenance is that you can check if a widget with unique serial number number X has been produced, who currently possesses it, and whether it has already been used. It would also be possible for each manufacturer to maintain their own record, so blockchain is not the only solution, but it is a fairly good fit to this particular problem. As with manufacturers maintaining ownership records, it cannot absolutely prevent a counterfeit part being used, but since the part would have to come from the company who was the last holder of record for a specific genuine part, and the record for that genuine part would be marked as "consumed", normally there would be no financial motive to supply a counterfeit. (Supply to Russia might be a an exception).

Ultimately there are counterfeit parts installed in planes that fly passengers. The goal should be to keep counterfeit parts out of the plane. United installed counterfeit parts because their supplier handed them a document claiming the parts were from GE. GE disavowed the parts much later. Clearly a focus on law and prison didn’t work in this case to keep these parts out of the plane. Maybe another system of attestation would do a better job.