Golly NOW Boeing will supply some long delayed documents ??
More ‘troubling’ internal Boeing documents on 737 MAX set for release
Dec. 23, 2019 at 2:18 pm Updated Dec. 23, 2019 at 2:24 pm
By Dominic Gates
and Steve Miletich
Boeing has informed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that its internal investigation into development of the 737 MAX has turned up more “troubling communications” that the company’s lawyers say it needs to disclose, according to a person familiar with the details.
Though the implication is that the documents contain damaging information, Boeing has not yet sent them to the FAA or to the Congressional committees that are investigating the MAX crashes.
“The FAA is aware of the documents and is waiting for Boeing to turn them over,” said the person.
Boeing is expected to release the documents as early as today. The timing of such a move, so close to the holidays and on the same day as the sacking of CEO Dennis Muilenburg, might be intended to get the bad news out there all at once with less press coverage.
Several sources suggest the documents include further messages from Mark Forkner, the 737 Chief Technical Pilot during the development of the MAX. Forkner’s job was to test the MAX flight control systems in a simulator and to determine the information and training that pilots would need to fly the airplane.
It was Forkner who sent an email to an FAA official in March, 2016, asking that information about the MAX’s new flight control software—known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)—be omitted from the pilot manuals and not mentioned in pilot training.
In October, a 2016 instant message exchange between Forkner and another Boeing pilot was released in which Forkner stated that he had “basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly).”
In that loose conversation, during which Forkner was drinking vodka, he said MCAS had “run rampant” during simulator testing in 2016. Boeing said later he was referring to the simulator software being defective rather than MCAS itself.
And in a separate 2016 email to an FAA official, Forkner joked that he was “doing a bunch of traveling … jedi-mind tricking (foreign) regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA.”
These revelations produced outrage and were the subject of intense questioning of Muilenburg when he appeared before Congress in late October.