The charges are first criminal charges against an individual in the investigation into the cause of the two crashes that between them killed 346 people, led to the 20 - month grounding of Boeing's best selling plane and cost the company more than $20 billion.
The charges were not against a top executive. Instead, they are accused of defrauding Mark Forkner, 49, who was the chief technical pilot for Boeing during the certification process for the jet and is accused of misleading the FAA during that process in 2016 and 2017.
In an attempt to save Boeing money, Chad Meacham withheld critical information from regulators in a statement, said Acting U.S Attorney Forkner for the Northern District of Texas. His decision to mislead the FAA hampered the agency's ability to protect the flying public and left pilots stuck 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 declined a request for comment and Boeing did not respond to a request for comment.
Neadia Milleron, Mother of Samya Rose Stumo, who died in the second fatal crash in March of 2019, said the indictment of one former executive doesn't go far enough. The deaths of everyone who died in the Max crashes should be blamed, he said. The system within Boeing rewarded short-term financial gain over security, and Mark Forkner was operating within that system. Prosecutors can and should find quite a few more people responsible for causing the crashes. Every single family who lost someone in the Max crash feels the same way: Boeing executives and board of directors must go to jail. According to the indictment, Forkner misled the FAA about operating parameters of a safety feature known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or MCAS designed to stop the plane from climbing too fast and setting in a stall. If a steep climb was required, MCAS was designed to force the nose of the jets lower than it did in 2 days. But in the two crashes it forced the nose down when the plane was not climbing, which created the failure that caused the two fatal crashes. 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 passengers.