2 of 6 Boeing Max test fraud counts against pilot dropped

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A judge has tossed two of six fraud counts against a former Boeing pilot involved in evaluating the troubled Boeing 737 Max jetliner.

A federal judge in Fort Worth on Tuesday dismissed, on technical grounds, counts that accused Mark A. Forkner of making and using “a materially false writing... concerning an aircraft part,” in violation of federal law.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor denied, however, Forker’s attorneys’ request for dismissal of four other wire fraud counts for not stating a case.

Forkner, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, is scheduled to go on trial March 7.

A federal indictment accuses Forkner, 50, of deceiving regulators about a critical system that played a role in two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets that killed 346 people.

Prosecutors said that because of Forkner’s alleged deception, pilot manuals and training materials did not mention the system because of Forkner’s alleged deception.

The flight-control system in question activated erroneously and pushed down the noses of Max jets that crashed in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia. The pilots tried unsuccessfully to regain control, but both planes went into nosedives minutes after taking off.

Forkner was Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the Max program. Prosecutors said that Forkner learned about an important change to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System flight-control system in 2016 but withheld the information from the FAA. That led the agency to delete reference to MCAS from a technical report and, in turn, it didn’t appear in pilot manuals. Most pilots didn’t know about MCAS until after the first crash.

Prosecutors suggested that Forkner downplayed the system’s power to avoid a requirement that pilots undergo extensive and expensive...