Boeing ex-pilot's trial starts on fraud charges over 737 MAX

FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal prosecutor said Friday a former Boeing test pilot lied to regulators about changes to a critical flight-control system on the 737 MAX to reduce the cost of pilot training and save the company tens of millions of dollars.

However, a defense lawyer said Boeing engineers kept Mark Forkner in the dark about changes to the system, which played a role in two crashes that killed 346 people.

Forkner went on trial in U.S. district court in Fort Worth on four charges of fraud. He is the only person facing criminal charges in the case, which brought widespread condemnation to Boeing.

As the trial started with jury selection and opening statements, Forkner spoke only briefly, when the judge asked for his plea.

“I am not guilty,” he said, standing and turning to face the jury.

Based on court filings by both sides, the trial is likely to feature testimony from technical experts and also internal Boeing communications to shed light on discussions about the MAX inside the company.

Prosecutors also will attempt to use Forkner's own text messages against him, especially one in which he said, “So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)."

“The defendant had contempt for these regulators, and he mocked these regulators,” prosecutor Scott Armstrong told jurors, adding that as Forkner learned more about changes to the flight-control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, “He doubled down on the lies.”

Defense attorney David Gerger said his side will show jurors that Boeing engineers withheld information from Forkner. And it wasn't Forkner who set out to save the company money by minimizing pilot-training requirements, that objective came down directly from Boeing's board of directors, he said.

Until he left in 2018, Forkner was Boeing's chief technical pilot for the MAX, which gave him a key role in evaluating the differences between the MAX and previous 737s, and deciding how much training pilots needed to fly the new version.

According to the indictment, Forkner knew about changes that made a key flight-control system activate more often than originally planned, but he withheld that knowledge from Federal Aviation Administration regulators.

As a result, information about the new flight-control system, MCAS, was deleted from an FAA report and airplane manuals. Most pilots didn't know about it.

MCAS activated on faulty sensor readings minutes before crashes in 2018 off the coast of Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia. It repeatedly pushed the noses of the planes down, and pilots were unable to regain control.

The lines of software code underpinning the MCAS system and the physical box it runs on were programmed and built to Boeing's specifications by Rockwell Collins, one of the hundreds of partners that Boeing relied on to assemble the 737 MAX, according to communications between Boeing and 737 MAX customers reviewed by the Washington Post in 2019.

Rockwell Collins, now Collins Aerospace, is Cedar Rapids' largest employer and a unit of Raytheon Technologies.

The Washington Post and The Gazette contributed to this report.