Boeing 737 MAX. A chief technical pilot said he had used a “Jedi mind trick” to talk an airline out of extra training

In December 2017, 737 Chief Technical Pilot Mark Forkner told a colleague in an instant-message exchange that he had persuaded a foreign airline not to seek additional training requirements.

Forkner wrote that he had made the airline feel foolish for asking and described what he had done as a “Jedi mind trick.” He also said he should be paid $1,000 for each such call and claimed that the effort saved Boeing a very large amount of money.

Forkner said he had discouraged the airline from seeking extra training and described his action as a “Jedi mind trick.”

After these communications became public, Boeing said it regretted their content and apologized to the FAA, Congress, its airline customers and the flying public.

Boeing signed a contract with U.S. launch customer Southwest Airlines in December 2011.

Under the contract, Boeing agreed to pay Southwest $1 million for each MAX delivered if Southwest pilots could not operate the earlier 737 Next Generation (NG) and MAX interchangeably for any reason.

Boeing also agreed to reimburse direct training expenses beyond ten hours if the FAA required more than ten hours of training or simulator training.

Using Southwest’s firm orders and options as of October 2019, the report said a simulator-training requirement could have left Boeing with nearly $400 million in exposure to Southwest.

On August 16, 2016, one day before the FAA’s formal letter granting provisional Level B training approval for the MAX, Forkner emailed 40 Boeing employees and supervisors to announce the result.

The subject line celebrated approval at Level B with five exclamation marks. Forkner wrote that more than three years of work across multiple groups had reached the finish line.

One colleague then asked whether there really were no formal checks and whether a pilot could be away from the NG for 30 years and still move into a MAX, ending the message with “LOVE IT!” Forkner replied that no special currency requirements or formal checks had been identified by regulators and that this was the point of Level B.

A colleague celebrated the idea that a pilot could be away from the NG for 30 years and still move into a MAX; Forkner replied that this was the point of Level B.

From February through spring 2018, roughly a year after MAX type certification in March 2017, Boeing emails and instant messages recorded serious employee concerns about MAX simulator quality, management and schedule pressure.

In February, an employee said the MAX simulator at London Gatwick had 180 discrepancy reports. In the same exchange, one employee asked whether his colleague would put family on an aircraft whose crew had been trained in a MAX simulator. He said he would not; the colleague also answered no.

A month later another employee described the situation as a “bloody joke.” An April exchange said a simulator problem that could pitch a colleague into a stall had been under repair efforts for more than six months.

The simulator had 180 discrepancy reports, and two Boeing employees said they would not put family on a MAX-simulator-trained aircraft.

Boeing later said the qualification activity referenced in these communications occurred early in the simulators’ service life and that its MAX simulators were functioning effectively.

Michael Teal served as 737 MAX Vice President, Chief Project Engineer and Deputy Program Manager, and approved the design of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

In a Committee staff interview, Teal confirmed that at the time he signed off he did not know that MCAS relied on one angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor per flight, could activate repeatedly, or had been associated with an internal simulator test in which a Boeing test pilot took more than ten seconds to respond and described the condition as catastrophic.

When Committee staff summarized those three points and asked whether that was all information he did not know when he signed off on MCAS, Teal answered that it was correct.

The chief project engineer who signed off on MCAS acknowledged that he did not know three basic facts about the system and Boeing’s own test data.

Teal also explained that although he was responsible for requirements, configuration, design, testing and certification at the program level, no engineers reported directly to him.

A 2012 Boeing simulator test recorded a test pilot taking more than ten seconds to respond to uncommanded MCAS activation; the condition was described as catastrophic. In FAA terminology cited by the report, catastrophic failure conditions are expected to result in multiple fatalities, crew fatality or incapacitation, normally with loss of the aircraft.

The finding was not a one-off note that disappeared. According to the report, from 2015 through 2018 at least six MCAS coordination sheets referenced the potentially catastrophic consequences of a pilot response taking more than ten seconds.

The critical test result appeared repeatedly in Boeing’s internal MCAS documents, yet the Committee found no indication that it was shared with the FAA.

Boeing also told the Committee that it could find no record showing those coordination sheets had been shared with the FAA. The report notes that Boeing interpreted the regulations as not requiring it to share the data.

The AOA Disagree alert was intended to tell pilots when the airplane’s two angle-of-attack sensors disagreed substantially, and it was described as a standard MAX feature.

In August 2017, Boeing learned that the alert worked only on aircraft whose operators had purchased the optional AOA Indicator. That meant it was not functioning on the vast majority of MAX aircraft.

Rather than fix it immediately, Boeing decided to defer the repair until 2020, when the MAX-10 was then expected to enter service.

The report’s timeline says that by the Lion Air crash in October 2018, Boeing had knowingly delivered an estimated 200 MAX aircraft with nonfunctioning AOA Disagree alerts without telling the customers or the FAA.

Boeing said its senior leadership was not aware of the AOA Disagree alert issue at the time. According to the report, Boeing accelerated the fix after the Lion Air crash; the FAA certified the updated software on February 25, 2019, and one MAX with that software was delivered before the grounding.

In June 2018, Renton plant Senior Manager Ed Pierson emailed 737 General Manager Scott Campbell about exhausted workers, schedule pressure and safety concerns.

Pierson wrote that his internal warning bells were going off, that for the first time he hesitated to put his family on a Boeing airplane, and that the production line should be temporarily stopped.

Campbell replied the next morning that quality came first and schedule after that. But it took more than five weeks before an in-person meeting occurred.

Pierson put the warning in personal terms: he wrote that he hesitated to put his own family on a Boeing airplane.

Pierson later testified that at the meeting he said military operations would stop under comparable safety conditions, and that Campbell responded that the military was not a profit-making organization. That exchange is Pierson’s testimony; the report does not present an independent recording of it.

After the Lion Air crash, the FAA used its Transport Airplane Risk Assessment Methodology (TARAM) to estimate the risk of continued MAX operations.

The analysis indicated that even with the FAA’s emergency directive in place, but without a permanent MCAS fix, there could be more than 15 fatal crashes over the estimated 30-year life of a 4,800-aircraft fleet, resulting in more than 2,900 deaths.

This was a statistical risk estimate based on assumptions, not a prediction that a specific number of crashes would occur. It assumed that 99 out of 100 pilots would respond properly to uncommanded MCAS activation; the report argued that this may have been optimistic. The FAA separately expected Boeing to have an MCAS fix by July 2019.

The FAA’s risk analysis produced a figure of more than 15 fatal crashes without a permanent MCAS fix, yet the MAX remained in service.

The Committee said it could not determine which members of FAA senior leadership knew the analysis at the time and said FAA declined to provide requested internal communications about it.

After the Lion Air crash, the FAA’s Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office began an internal review of Boeing’s MCAS submissions and the FAA’s certification work.

A February 8, 2019 draft concluded that the oversight activity had found no Boeing noncompliance. It identified assumptions and opportunities for improvement but said they did not require corrective action.

The draft was never finalized. FAA told the Committee that management review was overtaken by the Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Metadata reviewed by the Committee showed that the draft was opened and printed by an FAA employee on March 11, 2019—the day after the Ethiopian crash.

The Committee repeatedly sought a copy. FAA declined to provide one because the document was a draft, but later permitted Committee staff to review it remotely in camera.