A federal prosecutor said Friday that 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.
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. The indictment does not blame the crashes on Forkner, but his lawyers said he would not be facing criminal charges if the crashes had not occurred.
The defense could call more than two dozen current or former Boeing employees, including several test pilots and Curtis Ewbank, an engineer who quit after alleging that his bosses rejected safety improvements to the Max on cost grounds. Forkner is listed as a potential witness.
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