The charges were not against a top executive. Instead they were against Mark Forkner, 49, who was the chief technical pilot for Boeing during the certification process for the jet and is accused of deceiving the FAA during that process in 2016 and 2017.
“In an attempt to save Boeing money, Forkner allegedly withheld critical information from regulators,” said Acting US Attorney Chad Meacham for the Northern District of Texas, in a statement. “His callous choice to mislead the FAA hampered the agency’s ability to protect the flying public and left pilots in the lurch, lacking information about certain 737 MAX flight controls. The Department of Justice will not tolerate fraud — especially in industries where the stakes are so high.”
Forkner’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment, and Boeing declined to comment.
Nadia Milleron, mother of Samya Rose Stumo, who was killed in the second fatal crash in March of 2019, said the indictment of one former executive doesn’t go far enough.
“Forkner is just a fall guy. He and Boeing are responsible for the deaths of everyone who died in the Max crashes,” she said. “The system within Boeing rewarded short term financial gain over safety, and Mark Forkner was operating within that system. Prosecutors can and should find quite a few other people who were also responsible for causing the crashes. Every single family who lost someone in the Max crash feels the same way: the executives and board of directors of Boeing need to go to jail.”
The indictment said Forkner provided the FAA with materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information about the system.
It said that Forkner deceived the FAA because he wanted to make sure that the FAA did not require pilots who would be flying the 737 Max to receive more expensive flight simulator training if they already had been trained on earlier versions of the 737. The ability to have 737 pilots fly the Max without additional flight simulator training was one of the selling points that Boeing made to its airline customers.
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