WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A former chief technical pilot for Boeing Co was charged on Thursday with deceiving federal regulators concerning the evaluation of the company's 737 MAX plane in order to save the U.S. planemaker money, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Mark Forkner, 49, was indicted for scheming to defraud Boeing's U.S.-based airline customers to obtain tens of millions of dollars for Boeing.
Boeing and a lawyer for Forkner did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The indictment said Forkner provided the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with "materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information" about a new part of the flight controls for the Boeing 737 MAX, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
