Former Boeing pilot faces federal charges

Families of Ethiopian Airlines victims want more execs held accountable

As one former Boeing safety executive faces U.S. federal court charges for his potential role in a Boeing aircraft’s deadly design flaw, those who lost loved ones say they think there are far more employees at the company who need to be held accountable.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indictment was laid on Mark A. Forkner, a former chief technical pilot for Boeing, alleging that Forkner lied to the Federal Aviation Administration about the Boeing 737 Max’s Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a software that controls the plane’s flight systems.

Robert A. Clifford, lead counsel for the 147 families of the 157 victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash in 2019, says that they’re skeptical that Forkner is solely responsible for misleading the U.S. federal government about the plane’s software.

It’s all still fresh for Hamiltonian Paul Njoroge. His wife, Carol, their three young kids, Ryan, Kelli and Rubi, and his mother-in-law, Ann Wangui Karanja, all died in the Ethiopia crash, and Njoroge feels he may never find closure from their loss.

The only thing that could bring Njoroge anywhere close to healing is seeing every person responsible for the crash be held accountable and that a tragedy like this never happens again.

“I would like to see the grand jury do a thorough fact finding process and go after the top level management within Boeing,” Njoroge said. “There will never be justice for the death of my family, but at least there will be justice to the public because the public deserves to know what happened.”

Njoroge says that he thinks Forkner is a “fall guy” taking the hit for potentially numerous other Boeing employees who were also involved in approving the MCAS software. And he’s not the only one who feels that way.

“The families feel strongly that Mr. Forkner is not only responsible, but he’s also a fall guy for the senior leadership of Boeing that must have known about the cause of the first crash,” Clifford said.

Boeing told the Star that it has no comment on the families’ claims.

Clifford told the Star that the charge claims that the pilots didn’t know how to react to the software because they weren’t trained on how to use it. This ultimately resulted in two plane crashes that happened minutes after takeoff, according to the indictment.

The first crash happened in October 2018 during Lion Air Flight 610 from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia.

The second happened in March 2019 on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya. In both crashes, all passengers — 189 and 157 respectively — died.

Clifford says that since courthouses are closed because of the pandemic, “they’re at least a year away or more from trial, which is very troubling, of course, to all the families. The process is, as they say, at least a year behind.”

Chris Moore, whose 24-yearold daughter Danielle died in the Ethiopia crash, says the trial’s delays due to COVID-19 is only a small portion of the “nightmare” he and his family in Toronto are living through, but they’re trying to take things one day at a time.

Earlier this year, Transport Canada approved the Boeing 737 Max for flight once again after it grounded the plane in March 2019 in response to the two crashes.

Moore is grateful for Transport Canada’s review of the plane’s redesign before allowing it to operate in Canadian airspaces again. Still, Moore says he remains wary about air travel ever since Danielle’s death.

“I really just don’t want to fly, not because I’m concerned about the safety — I just don’t want to participate in the aviation industry (and) give them my dollar,” Moore said. “I may not be able to get off the continent, but that’s the way it is. To me, aviation is not a need; it’s a nice thing to have.”