By Kevin Brenner | Friday, June 26, 2026

Not Good is not an indictment of the companies it covers. It is a study of the mistakes made inside them by people prone to making them.

Kevin R. Brenner is Special Counsel at Global Link Law, where he leads the firm’s Global Investigations & Risk Advisory, Regulatory & Compliance, and Employment Risk & Workplace Investigations practices. A former federal prosecutor with more than two decades of courtroom, investigative, and advisory experience, Kevin helps healthcare and multinational organizations manage enforcement risk, respond to government scrutiny, and build compliance programs that operate effectively across borders.

_______________________________________________________

In most compliance failures, the dangerous sentence is not written in legalese. It is written in a chat, a slide, a meeting note, or an email someone assumes will stay buried.

At Boeing, one of those sentences came from a 737 MAX technical pilot in 2016: “Jedi-mind tricking [foreign] regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA.”

That line is not the whole Boeing story. It is the doorway into it.  The MAX was sold as continuity. Boeing needed airlines, regulators, and pilots to treat the airplane as another 737. But the airplane had changed in ways that mattered.

The Boeing 737 MAX crisis shows what happens when a company makes a business promise before the safety and disclosure systems can support it. Boeing promised airlines a more efficient aircraft that could be flown by existing 737 pilots with limited additional training. That promise shaped engineering decisions, training positions, regulator communications, and internal escalation.

Tragically, two crashes followed. Lion Air Flight 610. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. 346 people died.

For legal and compliance leaders, Boeing leaves a simple warning: when commercial pressure turns disclosure into positioning, the compliance program has already lost the plot.

The promise Boeing made

By 2010, Boeing had a problem.

Airbus had launched the A320neo, a more fuel-efficient upgrade to its narrow-body aircraft. Airlines wanted it. American Airlines, long a major Boeing customer, placed a landmark narrow-body order in 2011 that included Airbus aircraft and Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. American later described that 2011 order as the moment it first selected the CFM LEAP-1B engine for 100 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

Boeing had a choice: build a new airplane, or stretch the life of the 737, a model first certified in 1967. A new aircraft would take years. It would also mean more training. Training costs airlines money: simulator time, scheduling, crews off the line.

Boeing chose the faster path.

The 737 MAX would remain a 737. Pilots already qualified on older 737s could transition with limited differences training. No clean-sheet certification. The FAA certified the MAX through an amended type certificate based on the 737NG. No major simulator requirement. That was the commercial pitch.

It also became the engineering box.

The problem that required a fix

The 737 MAX used larger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s. Because the 737 was an older design, those engines did not fit in the same place. Boeing moved them higher and farther forward on the wings.

That helped Boeing keep the 737 design while making the plane more fuel efficient. It also changed how the plane behaved in some situations.

At elevated angles of attack (AOA), the MAX could pitch up differently than earlier 737s. Pilots trained on older 737s would not necessarily expect that. If the MAX handled too differently from earlier 737s, pilots might need extra training. Extra training would make the plane less attractive to airlines.

Boeing’s answer was MCAS, short for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. MCAS was flight-control software. In certain situations, it could automatically move part of the tail to push the nose down.

As certified and delivered, MCAS had a dangerous weakness: it relied on only one AOA sensor. That sensor measured the aircraft’s angle relative to the oncoming airflow. The MAX had two of those sensors, but MCAS used only one.

If that one sensor sent wrong information, MCAS acted on wrong information. If the sensor falsely said the nose was too high, MCAS pushed the nose down. If the bad information continued, MCAS could push the nose down again. The FAA later described this as a core safety issue and required Boeing to redesign MCAS so it no longer relied on a single sensor.

Boeing assumed pilots would quickly recognize what was happening and respond correctly. That assumption failed. The NTSB later said the accident crews’ responses did not match Boeing’s assumptions, especially because the pilots were dealing with multiple warnings at the same time.

Delete MCAS

Forkner was Boeing’s Chief Technical Pilot for the 737 MAX program. His job included working with regulators on pilot training.

In October 2016, Forkner messaged a colleague that MCAS was “running rampant in the sim.” He later wrote: “So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly).” Around the same period, he described “Jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA.”Those messages became central to the criminal theory against Boeing and Forkner.

Then, in early 2017, Boeing pushed to remove MCAS from pilot-facing materials.

The training position Boeing advanced was straightforward: MCAS operated outside normal airline flying, so pilots did not need to train on it. The FAA accepted that position. MCAS was omitted from the final FAA training report and, as a result, from airplane manuals and pilot-training materials for U.S.-based airlines. That omission became a central fact in the investigations and enforcement actions that followed.

A system designed to change the way the aircraft handled was treated as something pilots did not need to know.

The crashes

Lion Air Flight 610 departed Jakarta on October 29, 2018. Shortly after takeoff, it crashed into the Java Sea. All 189 people on board died.

The official record does not treat the crash as having a single cause. It shows a chain: an erroneous left AOA sensor reading, repeated MCAS nose-down stabilizer commands, flight-deck alerts and workload, maintenance and reporting failures, and design assumptions that underestimated what crews would face in the cockpit. MCAS was central to the accident sequence because erroneous AOA data activated it and it repeatedly trimmed the aircraft nose down, but the official record treats the crash as a multi-factor failure.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 departed Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019. About six minutes later, it crashed. All 157 people on board died.

TheEthiopian final report put MCAS at the center of the probable cause, describing repeated nose-down inputs from MCAS after erroneous AOA input. The NTSB agreed that MCAS and related systems played a role but criticized the Ethiopian final report for insufficient attention to human performance and for unsupported findings about electrical problems as the source of the erroneous AOA data. The NTSB’s view was that the erroneous AOA output was caused by separation of the AOA sensor vane due to impact with a foreign object, most likely a bird. The BEA also said the report should have given more attention to crew performance and cockpit resource management.

In both crashes, erroneous AOA data caused MCAS to move the tail in a way that pushed the nose down. For Ethiopian 302, investigators disagreed over why the AOA data failed and what other factors contributed. But the lesson does not depend on resolving every causation dispute. Boeing and the certification process treated the failure chain as one pilots would promptly recognize and manage. The NTSB later concluded that the accident crews’ responses did not match Boeing’s assumptions about pilot recognition and response.

The FAA grounded the MAX on March 13, 2019, after new evidence from the crash site and refined satellite data pointed to a possible link between the two crashes. The aircraft returned to service only after the 20-month grounding, FAA-mandated design changes, software changes, and new pilot training requirements.

346 people. Two crashes. Five months apart.

The messages that survived

In January 2020, congressional investigators released internal Boeing communications.

One employee wrote: “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are supervised by monkeys.”

Another exchange was just as blunt. An employee asked, “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”

Those messages, like the “jedi-mind trick” message and others like it, were not the cause of the crashes. They were evidence of the condition inside the organization. People knew enough to worry. People said so. The concern did not turn into an effective stop.

The bill

In January 2021, Boeing entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with DOJ. The total resolution exceeded $2.5 billion: a $243.6 million criminal penalty, $1.77 billion in compensation to airline customers, and a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund.

DOJ’s statement was unusually direct. Acting Assistant Attorney General David P. Burns said the crashes “exposed fraudulent and deceptive conduct by employees of one of the world’s leading commercial airplane manufacturers.” He said Boeing employees chose “the path of profit over candor” by concealing material information from the FAA and attempting to cover up that deception.

DOJ treated the case as a disclosure failure, not a software failure alone. Information about MCAS that should have reached the FAA did not, and the absence of that information flowed into pilot manuals and training materials. For legal and compliance teams, that is the center of the case. A safety issue became an information-control issue, and the information-control issue became a criminal case.

Then DOJ charged Forkner personally. In October 2021, federal prosecutors indicted him for allegedly deceiving the FAA’s Aircraft Evaluation Group and Boeing’s airline customers about MCAS. The indictment charged two counts of fraud involving aircraft parts and four counts of wire fraud.

The criminal case did not hold. A federal jury acquitted Forkner in March 2022 on all four wire-fraud counts after deliberating less than two hours. The aircraft-parts fraud counts had already been dismissed before trial on the ground that MCAS, as software code, was not an“aircraft part”within the meaning of the statute.

The acquittal does not dilute the corporate lesson. Criminal fraud requires proof of intent beyond a reasonable doubt. Corporate failures often look different: broken process, business pressure, incomplete escalation, and disclosure decisions that no single trial can fully capture.

The 2021 DPA was supposed to end the criminal case if Boeing met its obligations. It did not.

On January 5, 2024, while Boeing was still operating under the DPA, a left mid-exit door plug separated from an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 during climb out of Portland. The NTSB later found that the aircraft had left Boeing’s Renton factory without the four bolts needed to prevent the door plug from moving upward.

Different incident. Familiar failure mode: a production system that depended on process discipline, documentation, and escalation, and did not get enough of any of them.

In May 2024, DOJ notified the court that Boeing had breached the 2021 DPA by failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of U.S. fraud laws.

That breach reopened the criminal case. In July 2024, DOJ and Boeing reached a proposed plea agreement, but the district court rejected it in December 2024. In May 2025, DOJ reached a non-prosecution agreement with Boeing instead. Under that agreement, DOJ agreed to move to dismiss the pending criminal charge, and Boeing agreed to additional payments and compliance, safety, and quality commitments.

The district court granted DOJ’s motion to dismiss in November 2025. The victims’ families then sought mandamus relief in the Fifth Circuit, challenging the 2021 DPA, the 2025 NPA, and the dismissal. In May 2026, the Fifth Circuit denied rehearing, withdrew its prior opinion, substituted a revised opinion, and denied the mandamus petitions.

That is a long chain from a question that should have been treated as non-negotiable: whether pilots responsible for protecting lives needed training on a new flight-control system.

The legal record is complicated. The governance lesson is not. Boeing’s exposure kept returning to the same place: what the company knew, who was told, what was documented, and whether the system forced hard information upward before it became public in the worst possible way.

My read

The easy version of the Boeing story is: bad software, bad emails, bad outcome.

That version lets the system off too easily.

The harder point is about incentives. By the time Boeing built the MAX, the company was operating under intense pressure to answer Airbus quickly, preserve the 737’s commercial advantages, and avoid a transition that would require costly simulator training. The House Transportation Committee’s final 737 MAX report identified production pressure, faulty technical assumptions, Boeing’s “culture of concealment,” and insufficient FAA oversight as central themes in the MAX failures.

That history did not begin with MCAS. It began with a business model built around continuity. The MAX was certified through an amended type certificate, using the 737-800 as the baseline, rather than through a new type certificate process.DOT OIG later found that MCAS was not an area of FAA emphasis during certification because Boeing presented it as a modification to the existing speed trim system, with limited range and use.

Bill George’s Harvard Business School Working Knowledge essay adds the cultural frame: Boeing’s post-McDonnell Douglas era shifted power away from its old engineering center of gravity and toward cost discipline, shareholder value, and executive distance from production. That does not mean McDonnell Douglas caused MCAS. It means the company that built the MAX was operating under a different set of incentives than the company people still imagined Boeing to be.

By the early 2010s, Boeing leadership had made a commercial commitment: the MAX would be fast, competitive, and cheap to transition into. That meant no clean-sheet certification story and no simulator-driven training burden. Once that promise was made, every engineering issue became a commercial issue. MCAS was developed inside that constraint.

A safety-critical company can have policies, trainings, hotline posters, committees, and ethics language. Boeing had all of that. The failure was deeper. The organization had spent years rewarding delivery, cost discipline, and market response. When added safety protections threatened those priorities, the organization kept finding ways to protect the program. It found a way around the friction.

Bottom of Form

What went wrong inside

Four forces converged.

First, the competitive pressure was real. Airbus’s A320neo put Boeing under pressure to respond quickly with an aircraft airlines could transition into without costly new simulator training. Boeing’s answer was the MAX.

Second, the technical fix was shaped by the commercial promise. MCAS existed to address a handling issue without creating a training issue. The original design relied on one sensor, could activate repeatedly, and was omitted from pilot materials. That was not a drafting accident. It reflected the pressure to solve the handling problem without disturbing the no-new-training promise.

Third, the certification structure blurred the line between regulator and regulated. The FAA delegated substantial certification work to Boeing under the Organization Designation Authorization model. Delegated oversight can be efficient. In this case, the House investigation concluded that Boeing withheld critical information from the FAA, customers, and pilots, including information about MCAS and about a cockpit warning that should have told pilots when the plane’s two AOA sensors disagreed but was not working on much of the MAX fleet.

Fourth, the internal warning system failed. The concerns were discussed and written down, but they did not become a stop, a broader disclosure, or a training requirement before the aircraft entered service.

That is what makes Boeing hard to read and necessary to study. This was a compliance failure measured in human consequences: two crash sites, 346 deaths, years of criminal proceedings, and families fighting over whether the company was held to account.

For legal and compliance leaders, the lesson is direct: when the business case depends on regulators, customers, or frontline operators not knowing something material, the company has already crossed from managing risk into manufacturing it.

Click Here to Schedule a 30 minute Consultation with Kevin Brenner

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The discussion of this matter, including the conduct of any individuals involved, is based solely on publicly available information and court filings. Nothing in this post should be interpreted as a statement of fact about any person’s character, intentions, or actions beyond what has been reported in official sources.

The analysis provided reflects general legal principles and commentary and may not apply to any specific situation. Reading this post does not create an attorney-client relationship with the author or their firm. If you have questions about how these issues may affect your organization, you should consult qualified legal counsel.

The information provided on this website is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created by accessing or using this website. Please consult with a qualified attorney before making any legal decisions. Global Link Law is not liable for any reliance on the information provided. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.