Unfortunately it looks like this is really a fall guy with no mention of where the instruction to hide this information came from.
On the other hand, according to his Linkedin Mark Forkner worked for the FAA before moving to Boeing to become the chief technical pilot, so he should have been well aware of the stakes when he hid information.
It's likely he thought FAA self certification [1] would allow Boeing to skate by, which is probably accurate if the planes hadn't fallen out of the sky.
Which is generally why in other areas a corporation may have its own verification/validation processes, but bring in a 3rd party to audit them. It's a common accounting process.
Although, as we saw with Arthur Anderson, that 3rd party isn't always so neutral. And, by virtue of getting paid by the company, may deliver the results wanted instead of the results that are accurate.
This is the C suite guy getting the charges levied on him with pretty solid evidence against him. if he wants to avoid long term jail they will use him to cut a deal to get more information to find out if any of the few people that are above him ordered him to do it.
I think it's worse than picking cost over safety. What Boeing did was knowingly push a bad position. They knew they were in the hole with the pilot training for the Max, they knew they had screwed up. Regardless of that, they kept pushing the line that it wasn't their fault right up until that became untenable. The issue here is a corporate culture that ignored red flags, that played games with the regulator and decided that they would gamble peoples lives and the entire company reputation (including all their employees) on a cost cutting, corrupt means of beating Airbus. The entire c-suite should be headed for orange jumpsuit land.
The CEO at the time, Martin Winterkor, and at least six other executives were indicted. Some of the executives were jailed but still not the CEO (I can find mentions of prosecutors discussing the sentence but no mention of him actually starting serving it).
But I have muche less hope in the capacity of the US to seriously incriminate its poster child.
The CEO Martin Winterkorn is German and Germany doesn't extradite their citizens outside the EU so nothing will happen there. According to Wikipedia, he was also charged in Germany but looks like he will walk free from most charges.
> Steve Jobs told employees a short story when they were promoted to vice president at Apple. Jobs would tell the VP that if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, Jobs would naturally demand an explanation from the janitor. "Well, the lock on the door was changed,' the janitor could reasonably respond. "And I couldn't get a key."
> The janitor's response is reasonable. It's an understandable excuse. The janitor can't do his job without a key. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.
> "When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs told his newly-minted VPs. "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."
> "In other words," (Jobs continued,) "when the employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say."
This makes a lot of sense. When you are high enough you are so far away from the trenches that the only responsibilities are: 1) Making decisions and 2) Taking blames for whatever reason. That's why you get the big bucks.
Extrapolated from that, I kinda understand why many senior employees do NOT want to climb the pole but instead staying closer to the trenches.
It means don't throw your people under the bus by blaming them and when something goes wrong take responsibility. When it goes wrong at the VP level it means an organizational failure and/or your failure to understand what your org was doing or your failure to train/hire good subordinates who could handle the details for you.
