Former Boeing pilot Mark Forkner could face criminal charges in a matter of weeks
Federal prosecutors are preparing to criminally charge a former Boeing pilot who is suspected of misleading regulators about safety issues during the approval process for the troubled 737 MAX, according to a new report.
Mark Forkner, Boeing's 737 MAX chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, could face charges in the next few weeks, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.
Prosecutors have been probing whether Forkner intentionally lied to the Federal Aviation Administration about the nature of new flight control software on the jet, which suffered two deadly crashes within months, killing 346 people.
Forkner's attorney David Gerger did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com early on Friday.
Gerger has previously said that his client would never intentionally hide a safety issue.
A Boeing 737 MAX airplane lands after a test flight at Boeing Field in a file photo. Forkner was Boeing's 737 MAX chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development
'Mark flew the MAX. His Air Force buddies flew the MAX. He would never put himself, his friends or any passenger in an unsafe plane,' Gerger told the Journal in 2019.
It wasn't immediately clear what criminal charges might be brought against Forkner, but Boeing previously admitted in a settlement that two unnamed employees conspired to defraud the FAA about MAX training issues to benefit themselves and the company.
Forkner had said he might have unintentionally misled regulators, in a series of internal messages from 2016 that became public in October.
The messages appeared to have been the first publicly known observations that the crucial MCAS anti-stall system behaved erratically during testing before the aircraft entered service.
Malfunctions with the MCAS system, complicated by inadequate
