An American Airlines Boeing 737-800, equipped with radar altimeters that may conflict with telecom 5G technology, can be seen flying 500 feet above the ground while on final approach to land at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, on Jan. 6, 2022. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)
A Federal Aviation Administration official has claimed that a former Boeing chief test pilot misled her about changes to the company’s Boeing 737 Max software which were later connected to two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Stacey Klein, an FAA training specialist, was in charge of determining what training pilots needed for the Max during its development, and as such, said had regular interactions with Mark Forkner, who previously served as Chief Technical Pilot for Boeing.
Forkner was indicted for four counts of wire fraud for allegedly deceiving and withholding “critical information” from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) about the 737 Max jetliner in an attempt to save tens of millions of dollars for the airplane manufacturer.
He is currently on trial in Fort Worth, and Klein gave her testimony on the second day of his trial on March 21.
Forkner, who faces up to 80 years in federal prison if convicted, has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys argue that he is being used as a scapegoat and that it was Boeing’s directors, and not Forkner, who had pushed for fewer pilot training requirements in an effort to save money.
Klein testified that Forkner had been “very unprofessional“ and made her feel bullied during their meetings together to discuss potential training requirements.
She said that Forkner’s face would “turn red, that he would slam his hands down onto the table and raise his voice” during such meetings, noting that she relied on him to inform her about any design changes to the Max which and that they were “direct counterparts in the process.”
In a press release from the DOJ, prosecutors accused Forkner of providing the FAA with “materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information” about a new part of the flight controls for the Boeing 737 MAX called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
According to Boeing, MCAS provides consistent airplane handling characteristics in a very specific set of unusual flight conditions, such as when the pilot is flying the airplane manually, when the airplane nose approaches a higher-than-usual angle or when the plane’s wing flaps are up.
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations require that all commercial jetliners have smooth handling characteristics in all flight conditions.
Prosecutors allege that in around November 2016, Forkner discovered information about an important change to MCAS but did not share this information with the FAA AEG.
Indonesian navy frogmen emerge from the water during a search operation for the victims of the crashed Lion Air plane in the waters of Tanjung Karawang, Indonesia, on Oct. 30, 2018. (Tatan Syuflana/AP)
Ethiopian Red Cross workers carry a body bag with the remains of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash victims at the scene of a plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 12, 2019. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
Due to this, prosecutors say, a key document published by the FAA AEG called the “737 MAX Flight Standardization Board Report” (FSB Report) lacked any reference to the MCAS system.
This, prosecutors argue, resulted in airplane manuals and pilot-training materials for U.S.-based airlines also lacking any reference to the flight control law.
Klein said on Monday that Forkner had reassured her on multiple occasions that pilots would not encounter the MCAS system in an attempt to have any mention of it removed from airplane manuals and training documents, which would have required pilots to undergo further training for the 737 MAX, telling prosecutors, “he lied.”
If she had known of the changes, she would have needed to re-evaluate how much training pilots needed to undergo, she said.
However, she acknowledged that at times it appeared as though she had more information than Forkner did regarding certain aspects of the MAX’s development.
The Epoch Times has contacted lawyers for Mark Forkner for comment.
The FAA AEG began reviewing and evaluating MCAS after the Indonesian airline Lion Air crash in 2018. That crash involved a Boeing 737. All 189 people aboard the plane were killed when the flight plummeted towards the Java Sea 13 minutes after departure.
FAA officials said they had learned that MCAS was operating on the flight in the moments before the crash and discovered that important information about the augmentation system had been withheld.
In 2019, another Boeing 737 Max, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed shortly after takeoff killing 157 people.
FAA also learned that MCAS was operating in that flight moments before the crash. Shortly after that crash, all 737 MAX airplanes were grounded in the United States.
Boeing agreed to pay the DOJ $2.5 billion, including money for the crash victims’ families, airline customers, as well as a fine and admitted that employees misled regulators about the safety of its 737 MAX aircraft.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor reminded jurors on Monday that Forkner was not being tried for the two Max crashes.
Forkner’s trial comes as a China Eastern Airlines jet, a Boeing 737-800 which is not part of the Max family, crashed in southeast China on March 21. There were 123 passengers and nine crew members on board but the number of casualties isn’t yet known.
