Probably it is more common.
Highly regulated, certificated sector where a single bolt can be dozen time expansive "just" for a FAA approval is an honey jar.
I never understood Mechanical and Electronic parts counterfeits. The amount of effort to create a forgery of a Louis Vuitton bag seems to have so much less effort/payoff ratio than create a fake IC or create parts with low grade steel.
Specially considering that you are risking lives and will most likely be chased for liability versus a fake handbag or whatever other luxury item.
As another example, the amount of scalpers (due to electronics parts shortage) trying to sell fake ICs to suppliers of medical devices is very scary.
Similar with mechanical parts. Quite similar to the real article but with corners cut and verifications skipped.
They're probably building or unknowingly ordering counterfeit parts and naturally those parts pop up elsewhere.
Maybe most of the bolts are made of the right alloy and heat treated correctly, but you're using a crappy furnace with no temperature logging so you don't see that the furnace's temperature dips too low one morning...and you don't test as much of your runs because you cheap out on your QA staff, so you don't catch it.
The computing equivalent would be where how CPUs which fail QA are binned to lower spec (e.g. using 6 cores not 8, or underclocked), except in this instance it’s then still sold as the top-end chip even if it’s unstable and crashes under load sometimes.
> Specially considering that you are risking lives and will most likely be chased for liability
I read an interesting book about this once: Poorly Made in China. Author tells stories of chinese factories manipulating the quality of products such as steel. The factories would gradually reduce the amount of each steel component. They'd use a little bit less iron than they need to, then a little bit less chromium... They'd gradually cut costs by manipulating quality, pocket the difference, become wealthier, all while passing the risk down to their western buyers. Nothing happened immediately, nobody even noticed until some steel scaffolding collapsed, workers fell to their deaths, someone tried to figure out what was going on and noticed the steel chemistry was all over the place.
People sociopathic enough to do stuff like this could not care less about lives or deaths. What matters is rising in life, getting rich. Life, death, safety, risk? Somebody else's problems.
Like if people doesn’t care about killing their coworkers they work with and can see, they sure as shit don’t care about dangerous practices that impact someone they don’t know.