The first indictment in the Boeing 737 MAX crisis shouldn’t be the last. A federal grand jury has charged the company’s former chief technical pilot, Mark Forkner, of defrauding US Federal Aviation Administration officials in evaluating Max and planning to defraud the aircraft maker’s customers. So far only Forkner has been indicted in relation to the Max’s crash, which prompted the two-year grounding of the globally best-selling jet. Boeing’s market value is about half what it was before; The damage to its reputation and to the FAA is immeasurable.
Forkner, a mid-level manager whose job included coordinating with the regulator on pilot-training information, pleaded not guilty; His lawyer said that he is being made a scapegoat. Crashes have been linked to flight-control software, MAX’s Maneuver Features Augmentation System (MCAS), which was originally designed to protect against an aerodynamic stall, but instead often forced aircraft to stall and set off a cacophony of alerts that overwhelmed the pilots. The FAA kept its details out of the manual and training module because officials believed it was only operational in extreme situations. The indictment states that Forkner allegedly failed to notify regulators when he learned that the scope of MCAS had been expanded for activation under relatively normal flight conditions.
A major sales pitch for the Max was that pilots already well-versed in flying older 737 models would need a little extra training. The new MCAS may have prompted the FAA to require more extensive training, which would have been costly. The details of the indictment for Forkner aren’t flattering, but the idea that he was acting as some kind of rogue employee and alone should be to blame for it all defies logic. The indictment states that Forkner was aware that Boeing had agreed to compensate at least one airline customer if the FAA required more significant pilot training. It doesn’t say that he made this decision himself. Nor did they choose to expand the scope of the MCAS in the first place, without the kind of improvements that Boeing has made to regain the MAX Airborne. He may not even have been properly informed about the resale. “I basically lied to regulators (unintentionally),” he wrote to a colleague, when he appeared to be on a mock test flight about the changes.
It wasn’t a person behind it, it was a culture that encouraged this kind of behavior and a company that lacked the inter-departmental coordination and quality control needed to get airplanes out safely.
Forkner has essentially been given a slap on the wrist for settling a criminal charge of conspiracy to defraud the US government with Boeing in January, in the language of a US Justice Department statement. The deferred prosecution agreement requires Boeing to cooperate with investigators, increase reporting on internal controls, and meet regularly with regulators to prove it is doing all it can to discourage future violations. But the department concluded that Boeing did not need an independent compliance monitor, as its “misconduct was neither widespread across the organization, nor perpetrated by large numbers of employees, nor facilitated by senior management. Was.”
Really? Forkner left Boeing in July 2018. The first Max accident occurred in October of the same year. After the second crash in March 2019, it took several months for Boeing to take full responsibility for its role in the accidents. Boeing repeatedly pushed an overly optimistic deadline for the return of the MAX, and it wasn’t until January 2020 that Boeing finally recommended simulator training for pilots.
Despite the crash, its then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg was paid a total of $23.4 million in 2018. He was ousted in December 2019 but has re-emerged as head of New Vista Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company that has raised more than $200 million. Earlier this year to seek deals in the space or air mobility industry.
It is worth noting that it is probably also in the interest of the US government to portray the Max crisis as the work of rogue employees; Boeing’s full-scale criminal prosecution at the corporate level could complicate the company’s ability to continue to obtain federal contracts. Boeing is one of the top US defense contractors and America’s only manufacturer of large commercial jets. Placing the blame on Boeing employees who communicate with the FAA also draws attention to why regulators failed to investigate more thoroughly. The Wall Street Journal reports that officials elsewhere within the FAA were aware of significant changes to the MCAS, even though the people Forkner interacted with on pilot training were not.
The 737 MAX crisis reflects a systemic breakdown in company culture, management oversight and airplane safety regulation. If there’s a primary villain in this mess, it’s not Mark Forkner.
Brooke Sutherland is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies
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