Among the Boeing pilots, it would have been hard to guess that the most famous of them to emerge from the MAX’s development would be Mark Forkner. In the pecking order of Boeing’s pilots—who knew their pecking order implicitly—Forkner’s group came in about dead last. First came the test pilots, the Chuck Yeagers and Tex Johnstons who executed the daring maneuvers and talked to the press about it in leather bomber jackets afterward. They might nose the plane into a stall, or drag its tail along the runway like a hot-rodder on a motorcycle—the “velocity minimum unstick” test to determine takeoff
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