Former Boeing Pilot Indicted in Probe of 737 MAX Crashes

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

I really didn't think that anyone had the guts to go after anyone within the Boeing empire, especially not criminally.

Bottom line, Boeing put profits over aircraft, passenger and public safety in their rush to beat competitor Airbus to the finish line with a new fuel efficient, long haul aircraft. Instead of using it's more than half a century's worth of accumulated knowledge to build a better aircraft, it opted for a shortcut - revamp the Boeing. Then knowing that they had introduced a design flaw risks, they rushed to market with disastrous results:

​

By David Gelles, Natalie Kitroeff, Jack Nicas and Rebecca R. Ruiz​

• March 23, 2019

Boeing faced an unthinkable defection in the spring of 2011. American Airlines, an exclusive Boeing customer for more than a decade, was ready to place an order for hundreds of new, fuel-efficient jets from the world’s other major aircraft manufacturer, Airbus.​

The chief executive of American called Boeing’s leader, W. James McNerney Jr., to say a deal was close. If Boeing wanted the business, it would need to move aggressively, the airline executive, Gerard Arpey, told Mr. McNerney.​

To win over American, Boeing ditched the idea of developing a new passenger plane, which would take a decade. Instead, it decided to update its workhorse 737, promising the plane would be done in six years.​

​

The 737 Max was born roughly three months later.​

Continued here: Boeing Was ‘Go, Go, Go’ to Beat Airbus With the 737 Max (Published 2019)​

Former Boeing Pilot Indicted in Probe of 737 MAX Crashes

Federal prosecutors allege that Mark Forkner lied about automated system blamed in disasters​

The 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 took 346 lives.​

Photo: Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images​

​

By Andrew Tangel and Dave Michaels​

Updated Oct. 14, 2021 11:22 pm ET

​

A federal grand jury in Texas indicted a former Boeing Co. pilot, alleging that he deceived air-safety regulators about a flight-control system later blamed for sending two 737 MAX jets into fatal nosedives.​

Mark A. Forkner, 49 years old, was charged with six counts of fraud related to his alleged role in persuading the Federal Aviation Administration to approve pilot-training materials that excluded references to the automated cockpit feature, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday. The crashes occurred in late 2018 and early 2019 and took 346 lives.​

David Gerger, an attorney for Mr. Forkner, didn’t respond to requests for comment late Thursday. Mr. Gerger has previously said that Mr. Forkner, a pilot and Air Force veteran, wouldn’t endanger pilots or passengers and that his communications with regulators were honest.​

Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Forkner, in his role as Boeing’s 737 MAX chief technical pilot, withheld crucial information from the FAA about the flight-control system known as MCAS. As a result of his alleged deception, a key FAA report, pilot manuals and training materials lacked references to the system, defrauding Boeing’s airline customers, prosecutors said.​

Mr. Forkner “abused his position of trust by intentionally withholding critical information about MCAS,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. said in a statement.​

Mr. Forkner is expected to make an initial court appearance Friday in Fort Worth, prosecutors said. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and 10 years in prison for each count of fraud involving aircraft parts in interstate commerce.​

Boeing and the FAA declined to comment. The case against Mr. Forkner is the first time an individual has faced charges related to the dual MAX crashes, the first of which occurred three years ago this month. Boeing reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department earlier this year.​

In addition to the MCAS system, accident investigators cited airline and crew missteps as factors in the crashes. The second accident prompted a nearly two-year global grounding of the fleet and plunged Boeing into the deepest corporate crisis in its more than 100-year history. The FAA approved the aircraft to fly again in the U.S. late last year.​

The MCAS system was initially designed to activate during certain high-speed flying conditions that airline pilots wouldn’t normally encounter. During the aircraft’s development, Boeing engineers later expanded the system’s authority to include certain low-speed conditions that would trigger it.​

USA vs. Mark A. Fortner​

• Read the Indictment

In chat messages previously released by congressional investigators, Mr. Forkner suggested that he hadn’t told regulators that Boeing engineers made the MCAS system more potent and that pilots would be more likely to encounter it during flight. Mr. Forkner suggested in the messages that he hadn’t known about changes to the flight-control system. “So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” he said in one 2016 message.

Around the same time, according to the indictment, Mr. Forkner contacted a senior Boeing engineer assigned to the 737 MAX program to ask about the flight conditions that would trigger MCAS. The engineer confirmed to Mr. Forkner that the system had been expanded to work in low-speed conditions, not just during certain high-speed situations, the indictment said.

The indictment alleged that Mr. Forkner could have at that point told the FAA about the change in the system but instead chose not to. A few months later, Mr. Forkner again recommended that the FAA not include a reference to the system in a report that determined how much training pilots would need to fly the new jet, the indictment said.

Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Forkner’s efforts to mislead the FAA had the effect of defrauding Boeing’s airline customers. The carriers were deprived of information about the jet that may have influenced their decisions to buy the 737 MAX, the indictment said.

Mr. Gerger has said that Mr. Forkner’s chat messages referred to problems with a simulator, not the aircraft.

Following the first crash, on Oct. 29, 2018, which killed 189 passengers and crew aboard a Lion Air jet that had taken off in Indonesia, the FAA group that dealt with Mr. Forkner learned that MCAS might have played a role in the disaster. Another 737 MAX airliner crashed in Ethiopia on March 10, 2019, killing 157 people.

According to the indictment, Mr. Forkner knew a key Boeing objective was to secure FAA approval for a training package that wouldn’t require MAX pilots to undergo simulator training, which would be costly to the manufacturer’s airline customers.

​

A new type of defect on Boeing’s Dreamliner aircraft surfaced recently, the latest in a series of issues that have led to a halt in deliveries. The company now has more than $25 billion of jets in its inventory. WSJ’s Andrew Tangel explains how Boeing got here. Photo: Reuters The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Mr. Forkner believed he would be blamed if regulators required a greater amount and Boeing suffered financially, according to the indictment. Prosecutors cited a December 2014 email he allegedly wrote: “It was Mark, yes Mark! Who cost Boeing tens of millions of dollars!”

The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that Boeing had agreed to rebate Southwest Airlines Co. $1 million per MAX plane that required simulator training.

As part of Boeing’s earlier settlement with the Justice Department, the company was charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the FAA. Under terms of the settlement, Boeing will avoid prosecution on that charge—and remain eligible for federal contracts—as long as the company avoids legal trouble for a period of three years.

Boeing’s settlement with the Justice Department, which didn’t cite Mr. Forkner by name, stated that the misconduct by its former employees was “neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management.”

 

[miketx]

How come there is no white people bashing here?

 

[DigitalDrifter]

The 737 MAX is an act of white supremacy.

 

[Bootney Lee Farnsworth]

I really didn't think that anyone had the guts to go after anyone within the Boeing empire, especially not criminally.

Bottom line, Boeing put profits over aircraft, passenger and public safety in their rush to beat competitor Airbus to the finish line with a new fuel efficient, long haul aircraft. Instead of using it's more than half a century's worth of accumulated knowledge to build a better aircraft, it opted for a shortcut - revamp the Boeing. Then knowing that they had introduced a design flaw risks, they rushed to market with disastrous results:

​

By David Gelles, Natalie Kitroeff, Jack Nicas and Rebecca R. Ruiz​

• March 23, 2019

Boeing faced an unthinkable defection in the spring of 2011. American Airlines, an exclusive Boeing customer for more than a decade, was ready to place an order for hundreds of new, fuel-efficient jets from the world’s other major aircraft manufacturer, Airbus.​

The chief executive of American called Boeing’s leader, W. James McNerney Jr., to say a deal was close. If Boeing wanted the business, it would need to move aggressively, the airline executive, Gerard Arpey, told Mr. McNerney.​

To win over American, Boeing ditched the idea of developing a new passenger plane, which would take a decade. Instead, it decided to update its workhorse 737, promising the plane would be done in six years.​

​

The 737 Max was born roughly three months later.​

Continued here: Boeing Was ‘Go, Go, Go’ to Beat Airbus With the 737 Max (Published 2019)​

Former Boeing Pilot Indicted in Probe of 737 MAX Crashes

Airbus is better than Boeing and it ain't even close.

 

[SavannahMann]

I’ve read a lot about the accidents, and the situation which led to them. I am an aviation junkie,, if you like. I’d like to explain it simply if I can, so everyone is on the same sheet of music.

First. The 737-800 MAX was going to be the last round of upgrades for the venerable old plane design. The idea was to make the plane lighter using more Carbon Fiber, and more efficient by using bigger engines.

Let me explain. The type of engines that passenger jets use these days is called TurboFan engines. The turbine that drives the engine produces a percentage of the power, generally between thirty and seventy percent of the total thrust power. The rest is produced by the “bypass” air. The huge fan in the front pushes more than twice the air that the turbine can use back into the engine. As the air is further pushed, and compressed, much of it is passed outside of the Turbine, and then exhausted out the back of the engine with the thrust from the turbine. Imagine a huge propeller spinning really fast, and you understand the principle of the TurboFan.

This is far more efficient in fuel usage than a TurboJet, that is to say the kind of engines Fighters use. The TurboJets get all their power from the burning fuel pushing hot air out the back through the impellers.

So to maximize the 737 fuel efficiency, they went with even bigger engines than the -700. But this was already a problem. The engines were too big to be mounted under the wing, as older 737’s had their smaller engines mounted.

So they extended them even further forward. Now, this exacerbated the already existing problem of causing the plane to pitch upwards. To counter this trend, the Engineers put in a system to automatically pitch the aircraft down to counter an excessive climb rate, which would lead to a stall and airplane crash.

Training pilots is expensive. And if the pilots require too much training to be switched to the newest version of the 737 from existing planes, then the airlines would open the field to examine other alternatives, like the Bombardier, Embrarer, or Airbus aircraft.

I mean, if you have to retrain the pilots anyway, why not train them on a whole new aircraft instead of one they are already flying?

So the manual written on this new stall prevention system had some assumptions built in. First, that the system probably wouldn’t fail. But if it did, the result would be a spinning wheel in the cabin of the aircraft, the trim wheel, which the pilot was assumed to notice if he was of sufficient skill and quality to fly the 737. The pilot would deduce that the problem was with the Trim system, and turn the automatic Trim off. Two switches located on the lower center console turned the system off. Time was estimated to be less than thirty seconds from the onset of the problem, to the solution.

Let me explain Trim. The Horizontal Stabilizer, or the big flat wings in the back, actually change their angle up and down. The stick the pilot works adjusts tabs at the back, called Elevators. So adjusting the trim is vital. If the Trim adjustment is not correct, the elevators are incapable of countering the pitch commanded movement.

In other words, if the Horizontal Stabilizers are pushing the nose down, all the stick in the world won’t change that.

In the crash aircraft, the pilots did not notice the spinning wheel, and deduce that it was a problem with the trim. They assumed it was a computer fault, and were searching in the wrong part of the book for what to do. Boeing kept arguing at the time that all the pilots had to do was turn off the Pitch Control, and it was pilot error that they hadn’t.

They were right, and wrong. Yes it was pilot error not to disconnect the pitch control, but it was also a failure of Boeing to realize that there needed to be more training on the system. Boeing’s failure was much more directly responsible for the crash.

The wheel I am talking about is a huge wheel, about the size of a Semi Truck’s steering wheel sitting vertically along side the pilot’s seat. It spins rapidly when trim commands are sent, and can even be adjusted manually by gripping the wheel and moving it forwards or backwards.

Boeing downplayed the dangers involved with this system to keep the need for retraining out of the discussion. The assumptions they made were to their benefit. And such assumptions counting on the average person to do this or that, is always dangerous.

To use an analogy. Imagine you are at a gas station. A car on the other side of the pump catches on fire. Your first instinct will be to run, or get your car out of there. Not run and find the manual fuel shut off to cut the fuel flow to the fire. Counting on the average person to think about the emergency shut off, and have any clue where to find it is just idiotic. Boeing counted on the idiotic.

The Man indicted was under pressure, perhaps not directly stated, but he knew what was at stake. If the plane didn’t get out without additional training, Boeing was set to lose customers, and that was bad.

The Managers and Big Boss Executives were certain to mention how much Boeing needed this, and what could be done from an engineering standpoint to get it out there without the need for additional training?

The Pilots had alarms going off, and confusion about what was happening, and the spinning clacking wheel next to them went unnoticed. They never got close to the solution, turning off the Trim system, before they crashed minutes later.

I said at the time that there had been lots of crashes from automated systems failing. And many from pilots not being aware of the failure of an unknown automatic system.

Did Boeing intentionally jeopardize safety? Yes, sort of, but no, not really. Let me explain. When you are designing anything, you try to design it for the average user. The average user of that type of thing. For an airplane, you have to assume the pilot is competent. I mean, why would anyone design a plane for an incompetent pilot. What Boeing didn’t consider is the confusion and stress from an emergency situation environment. The Pilot is going to rely on his training, and that is going to be on what he was told and taught the plane would do, might do, and could conceivably do. This wasn’t on the list.

There was an accident once, where a pilot got conflicting information in the plane. It is suspected that Wasps built a nest in the Pitot tube causing a failure of the airspeed system. The pilot got warnings that he was over speed at the same time he was getting the stick shaker, indicating that he was too slow.

They put Instructors into a simulator, as part of the investigation, and nobody could fly the plane at night in those circumstances. Your training worked against you. You would have to ignore one warning, or the other. Take a guess, which was the right one.

Every single pilot crashed in the simulator. Nobody could fly it.

The Max crashes were survivable in the simulators, if the Pilots correctly guessed it was a failure of the Trim system. They would turn the Automatic Trim System off. And then they could fly the plane manually, and land it safely.

But counting on a person to guess correctly, isn’t a good plan. When it is life and death you don’t want the person deciding making it a coin toss. Door number one or door number two. Pick wrong and you’re dead.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

I’ve read a lot about the accidents, and the situation which led to them. I am an aviation junkie,, if you like. I’d like to explain it simply if I can, so everyone is on the same sheet of music.

First. The 737-800 MAX was going to be the last round of upgrades for the venerable old plane design. The idea was to make the plane lighter using more Carbon Fiber, and more efficient by using bigger engines.

Let me explain. The type of engines that passenger jets use these days is called TurboFan engines. The turbine that drives the engine produces a percentage of the power, generally between thirty and seventy percent of the total thrust power. The rest is produced by the “bypass” air. The huge fan in the front pushes more than twice the air that the turbine can use back into the engine. As the air is further pushed, and compressed, much of it is passed outside of the Turbine, and then exhausted out the back of the engine with the thrust from the turbine. Imagine a huge propeller spinning really fast, and you understand the principle of the TurboFan.

This is far more efficient in fuel usage than a TurboJet, that is to say the kind of engines Fighters use. The TurboJets get all their power from the burning fuel pushing hot air out the back through the impellers.

So to maximize the 737 fuel efficiency, they went with even bigger engines than the -700. But this was already a problem. The engines were too big to be mounted under the wing, as older 737’s had their smaller engines mounted.

So they extended them even further forward. Now, this exacerbated the already existing problem of causing the plane to pitch upwards. To counter this trend, the Engineers put in a system to automatically pitch the aircraft down to counter an excessive climb rate, which would lead to a stall and airplane crash.

Training pilots is expensive. And if the pilots require too much training to be switched to the newest version of the 737 from existing planes, then the airlines would open the field to examine other alternatives, like the Bombardier, Embrarer, or Airbus aircraft.

I mean, if you have to retrain the pilots anyway, why not train them on a whole new aircraft instead of one they are already flying?

So the manual written on this new stall prevention system had some assumptions built in. First, that the system probably wouldn’t fail. But if it did, the result would be a spinning wheel in the cabin of the aircraft, the trim wheel, which the pilot was assumed to notice if he was of sufficient skill and quality to fly the 737. The pilot would deduce that the problem was with the Trim system, and turn the automatic Trim off. Two switches located on the lower center console turned the system off. Time was estimated to be less than thirty seconds from the onset of the problem, to the solution.

Let me explain Trim. The Horizontal Stabilizer, or the big flat wings in the back, actually change their angle up and down. The stick the pilot works adjusts tabs at the back, called Elevators. So adjusting the trim is vital. If the Trim adjustment is not correct, the elevators are incapable of countering the pitch commanded movement.

In other words, if the Horizontal Stabilizers are pushing the nose down, all the stick in the world won’t change that.

In the crash aircraft, the pilots did not notice the spinning wheel, and deduce that it was a problem with the trim. They assumed it was a computer fault, and were searching in the wrong part of the book for what to do. Boeing kept arguing at the time that all the pilots had to do was turn off the Pitch Control, and it was pilot error that they hadn’t.

They were right, and wrong. Yes it was pilot error not to disconnect the pitch control, but it was also a failure of Boeing to realize that there needed to be more training on the system. Boeing’s failure was much more directly responsible for the crash.

The wheel I am talking about is a huge wheel, about the size of a Semi Truck’s steering wheel sitting vertically along side the pilot’s seat. It spins rapidly when trim commands are sent, and can even be adjusted manually by gripping the wheel and moving it forwards or backwards.

Boeing downplayed the dangers involved with this system to keep the need for retraining out of the discussion. The assumptions they made were to their benefit. And such assumptions counting on the average person to do this or that, is always dangerous.

To use an analogy. Imagine you are at a gas station. A car on the other side of the pump catches on fire. Your first instinct will be to run, or get your car out of there. Not run and find the manual fuel shut off to cut the fuel flow to the fire. Counting on the average person to think about the emergency shut off, and have any clue where to find it is just idiotic. Boeing counted on the idiotic.

The Man indicted was under pressure, perhaps not directly stated, but he knew what was at stake. If the plane didn’t get out without additional training, Boeing was set to lose customers, and that was bad.

The Managers and Big Boss Executives were certain to mention how much Boeing needed this, and what could be done from an engineering standpoint to get it out there without the need for additional training?

The Pilots had alarms going off, and confusion about what was happening, and the spinning clacking wheel next to them went unnoticed. They never got close to the solution, turning off the Trim system, before they crashed minutes later.

I said at the time that there had been lots of crashes from automated systems failing. And many from pilots not being aware of the failure of an unknown automatic system.

Did Boeing intentionally jeopardize safety? Yes, sort of, but no, not really. Let me explain. When you are designing anything, you try to design it for the average user. The average user of that type of thing. For an airplane, you have to assume the pilot is competent. I mean, why would anyone design a plane for an incompetent pilot. What Boeing didn’t consider is the confusion and stress from an emergency situation environment. The Pilot is going to rely on his training, and that is going to be on what he was told and taught the plane would do, might do, and could conceivably do. This wasn’t on the list.

There was an accident once, where a pilot got conflicting information in the plane. It is suspected that Wasps built a nest in the Pitot tube causing a failure of the airspeed system. The pilot got warnings that he was over speed at the same time he was getting the stick shaker, indicating that he was too slow.

They put Instructors into a simulator, as part of the investigation, and nobody could fly the plane at night in those circumstances. Your training worked against you. You would have to ignore one warning, or the other. Take a guess, which was the right one.

Every single pilot crashed in the simulator. Nobody could fly it.

The Max crashes were survivable in the simulators, if the Pilots correctly guessed it was a failure of the Trim system. They would turn the Automatic Trim System off. And then they could fly the plane manually, and land it safely.

But counting on a person to guess correctly, isn’t a good plan. When it is life and death you don’t want the person deciding making it a coin toss. Door number one or door number two. Pick wrong and you’re dead.

Wouldn't the most direct thing to do was have each pilot certified on the MAX run through a couple of scenarios where the exact thing they were hoping didn't happen actually happens? I mean that's how they train for all other emergencies, why didn't they train for this one although in my mind the problem goes way beyond not knowing the procedures. They broke the aerodynamics on a perfectly stable aircraft and then tried to fix what they broke by using a software fix that the pilots couldn't override and which crashed the planes

 

[SavannahMann]

Wouldn't the most direct thing to do was have each pilot certified on the MAX run through a couple of scenarios where the exact thing they were hoping didn't happen actually happens? I mean that's how they train for all other emergencies, why didn't they train for this one although in my mind the problem goes way beyond not knowing the procedures. They broke the aerodynamics on a perfectly stable aircraft and then tried to fix what they broke by using a software fix that the pilots couldn't override and which crashed the planes

The pilots could override it. The two switches.

But to hit those switches. Box number 3 on the pic. The Pilots needed to assess the problem as a Trim system failure.