737 Max crisis wasn’t one man’s fault

The first indictment in the Boeing Co 737 Max crisis should not be the last.
Late last week, a federal grand jury charged the company’s former chief technical pilot, Mark Forkner, with deceiving Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials in their evaluation of the Max and scheming to
defraud the plane maker’s customers.
Forkner is the only person to be indicted thus far in connection with the lead-up to the twin crashes of the Max, which killed 346 people, prompted a nearly two-year worldwide grounding of the best-selling jet and caused a moment of reckoning for the aviation regulators who blessed the plane as safe.
Boeing’s market value remains about half of what it was before the Max was grounded; the damage to its reputation and that of the FAA is immeasurable.
Forkner was an important liaison for the FAA. His responsibilities included coordinating with the regulator on information pertinent to pilot-training requirements. But he was also a mid-level manager. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. His lawyer, David Gerger, told the Wall Street Journal that his client was being made into a scapegoat. Gerger didn’t respond to a request for additional comment. Boeing declined to comment.
The Max crashes have been linked to flight-control software — known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — that was originally added to guard against an aerodynamic stall, but instead repeatedly forced the planes to nosedive and set off a cacophony of alerts that overwhelmed pilots. The FAA excluded details on MCAS from manuals and training materials because officials believed it turned on only in extreme situations. They thought this, according to the indictment, because Forkner allegedly declined to inform regulators when he learned that the scope of MCAS had been expanded so that the system would activate in more normal flying conditions.
A key sales pitch for the Max was that pilots who were already well-versed in flying older 737 models would need limited additional training. Proper consideration of MCAS may have led the FAA to require more extensive training, which would have been expensive and perhaps led some airlines to choose planes built by rival Airbus SE instead.
“In an attempt to save Boeing money, Forkner allegedly withheld critical information from regulators,” Chad Meacham, acting US attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a Department of Justice statement on the indictment.

—Bloomberg