[buildsjets]

The Chief Project Engineer is the person who is ultimately responsible for the design, engineering, testing, setting training requirements, certification, and everything else. The CPE for the 737 MAX was Michael Teal. There’s only room for one signature on the FAA application for an ammended type certificate, and it was his.

Forkner was not the Chief Pilot. He was the the Chief Technical Pilot, who is the person responsible for developing new training information for changed systems, getting it certified by the FAA, and coordinating with airlines to deploy it to their pilots. Therefore Forkner was responsible for:

Signing off on manuals to be provided to pilots that omitted MCAS. Signing off on training materials that omitted MCAS. Signing on on the verification and validation that MCAS was correctly represented in the flight simulators.

[dhx]

The Boeing program wanted Level B training only[1] which excludes flight simulator training, hence Forkner was trying to achieve that requirement by avoiding the need for pilots to undergo simulator training.

Even if you were to remove Forkner entirely from the decision making process, pilots would have been asked to fly an aircraft with a 'catastrophic' hazard only reduced to 'hazardous' by training pilots to respond to a very rare event within ~4 seconds of a failure event that the pilots weren't even notified of because the AoA sensor disagreement warning feature was an optional paid addon[2]. If a pilot were to take 10 seconds to respond... too late, the aircraft would likely have been lost[3].

Even with the best training in the world, is it reasonable to just expect pilots, within seconds, to be able to work around 100's of crap engineering and human machine interaction design decisions? As [3] notes, the lack of consideration of the pilot (as a human not a robot or computer) in the engineering design of the aircraft is glaring. Corporate Boeing wanted an aircraft that pilots didn't need to be retrained in, and thanks to unrealistic schedule expectations, they seemingly also didn't want to spend the time needed to remove all the HMI pain points that are inflicted on pilots.

[1] https://transportation.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Compressed%20...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-73...

[3] https://www.incose.org/docs/default-source/enchantment/21031...