Former Boeing Tech Pilot Found Not Guilty in 737 Max Case

Meg Godlewski

Thursday, March 24, 2022 at 08:29 AM ET

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The FAA certified the 737 Max in 2017. [Courtesy: Boeing]

Key Takeaways:

A former Boeing pilot, Mark Forkner, was acquitted of wire fraud charges for allegedly deceiving the FAA about the 737 Max's MCAS flight control system, implicated in two fatal crashes.
The jury deliberated for less than two hours, finding "very little evidence" that Forkner intentionally sought to deceive, instead suggesting it was a "corporate and regulatory failure of communication."
Prosecutors accused Forkner of withholding critical information about MCAS software changes from the FAA, leading to its omission from pilot training materials before the deadly Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.
Forkner was the only Boeing employee to face criminal charges, despite Boeing having previously settled with the Justice Department for $2.5 billion for misleading the FAA regarding the 737 Max.

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A jury has found a former Boeing pilot not guilty of deceiving the FAA about an issue with the 737 Max flight control system blamed for two fatal crashes.

Late Wednesday, a Texas jury acquitted 50-year-old Mark Forkner, of Keller, Texas, on all four counts of wire fraud stemming from accusations that in his role as chief technical pilot during the development of the 737 Max, he mislead an FAA representative about the amount of training pilots for the 737 Max would need to operate the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), an automation feature. The MCAS is software that lessens the need for pilot input during flight.