Federal Prosecutors Investigating Whether Boeing Pilot Lied to F.A.A.

MCAS was designed to activate only when the plane was making sharp turns at high speeds. But late in the development of the Max, Boeing engineers decided they needed MCAS to operate when the plane was flying at low speeds, too. To have the same effect on the plane at low speeds that it had at high speeds, the engineers gave the system more power.

In the messages from November 2016, Mr. Forkner seems to note that MCAS was triggering at low speeds.

“Oh shocker alert!” he wrote. “MCAS is now active down to M .2,” he added, using a technical term that denotes a relatively slow flying speed.

Mr. Forkner’s lawyers, David Gerger and Matt Hennessy, have said their client was reacting to the erratic behavior of a faulty flight simulator and did not mislead regulators.

“Mark didn’t lie to anyone,” they said in a statement. “He did his job honestly, and his communications to the F.A.A. were honest. As a pilot and Air Force vet, he would never jeopardize the safety of other pilots or their passengers. That is what any fair investigation would find.”

Mr. Forkner never told the F.A.A. group in charge of training that a change had been made to the software, The New York Times reported last year. And in emails with F.A.A. officials, he said MCAS would only rarely activate. Two months after his experience in the flight simulator, Mr. Forkner emailed F.A.A. officials to ask that they remove mention of the software from official training materials because, he said, it was so unlikely that it would ever trigger in normal circumstances.

“Delete MCAS,” Mr. Forkner wrote, “since it’s way outside the normal operating envelope.”

Prosecutors are also looking at whether there were broader cultural issues at Boeing that encouraged employees to lie to regulators. In January, the company released more than a hundred pages of internal correspondence in which employees ridiculed the F.A.A. and suggested that they had concealed information from the F.A.A.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/business/boeing-737-max-investigation.html