Mughrabi
2Bad2Sad; Sorry to hear about you guys' bad experiences with the cheating Munsen
I was one of those 747 crewmembers mentioned that were stiffed 2 years ago but it was for a different company called Orange Air Services. They had bought an old PIA 7472 under Mughrabis direction, effectively, "sold as seen" by PIA (I did see the bill of sale in the end after much sifting through paperwork) and were hoping to operate the hajj with it. An aggreement had been made on the remuneration that had exactly the same trap sprung in the end as with you. It was clearly 100USD per day per diem for every day away from our own homes and not from Amman as was later claimed. This was clarified by all. We were driven about from one place to another with some time spent in Tel Aviv with the real boss of Orange Air, an Israeli. The airline was set up as Jordanian based rather than Israeli (for the amusing obvious hajj reasons) with a seirra leonne registration. The boss was in fact honest but had found himself compromised by Mughrabi. He had trusted Mughrabi to deal with sourcing an aircraft for his contracts and to worry about the maintenance, airworthyness and staff hiring etc. Mughrabi had promised him all sorts of wonders with this queen of the sky, an old 7472(I seem to remember 1974) which was out of date on a number of AD's etc. Before my time it had been sent to Ryiad for a C service I believe but returned having only been painted!!! This was before my time and is only what we found out by digging. What we do know for 100% is that it had not had the work done on the AD's (engine mounting bolts among them) and also that it had serious corrosion in the wings and around the bulk hold as marked out in red all over the upper surface of the wings by the guys in Ryiad. I found welded skin underneath the flaked up resin channel on the forward upper surfaces of the wing. I seriously doubt whether is is approved maintenance procedure to do this however, even if it were, as a TIG welder, I would have condemned the welds as poor work and so it certainly didn't roll out of seattle like that! There was also a hole approx a square foot in the upper surface of the wing tip that had been fixed with speed tape and sprayed!!! I believe from talking to other people that the guys in Ryiad only quoted to put right this mess and didn't actually touch the aircraft and I am in no way implicating them in any of this.
Mughrabi however was trying to persuade the crew that the aircraft was completely airworthy and that all the mandatories were in compliance. It's true state was found out later. On contacting Boeing, it was discovered that the AD's were not in compliance or had not been reported to them as so. Heated exchanges were had with Mughrabi regarding where the paperwork for the AD's was if it was true they really had been done. All he would provide us with was an A4 Orangeair letter headed word document unsigned with some new expirey dates. It seemed as if after leaving PIA on its sold as seen flight it magically became a clean aircraft without anyone signing to say they'd done any work. When asked who had completed the mounting bolts and where their paperwork was he would just change the subject and get angry. To top things off the virginal tech log was for a tristar and so the poor number 4 didn't seem to exist.
I did feel rather sorry for the owner of Orangeair who had been conned by Mughrabi into buying a heap of junk with the promise of easily getting it going for the hajj and beyond. Mughrabi claimed to be the head of ground maintenance and also a flight engineer and a First Officer. I suspect like everything else his documents would have been a lie. This man is a serious liar and a danger to aviation full stop. Crews should be vigilent of all the maintenace records this man has ever been involved with. If he had succeded in conning a team into flying an aircraft that was seriously unairworthy we all know the potential consequences. He even attempted to tell us how he could get round the serious avionics work that was required to be done and signed for by using unlicenced mechanics signing for dailys. He claimed we were unaware of how a JAR tech log worked etc. He talks a load of half truths mixed in with a lie to try to baffle one into accepting things. On a good note for the Seirra Leonne CAA, I also saw the emails from the guys there which were effectivly calling him a liar over the maintenance records. They were talking of suspending the AOC if he did not come up with proper evidence of the work done. We all bailed around this point so I don't know what else happened.
All this took a long time to discover with a lot of hanging around in the meantime. Even before we had found out that he was lying about the condition of the aircraft he was back tracking on the pay. Suffice to say we got less than what had been agreed with him. Of major concern is that we might actually have been conned by him into operating an aircraft illegally and unnaware of its very poor condition.
I am dismayed to hear that he has managed to get himself involved in any way whatsoever with aviation again. His name should most definately be on the EU ban list. Given all the talk here about the required mods and maintenace to these old tristars, I would advise anyone considering any involvement with this man to look very carefully at the records to be sure.