By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) A U.S. judge dismissed two of four charges against a Boeing ex-chief technical pilot.

U.S. District Court Reed O’Connor, Texas granted part the request of attorneys for Mark Forkner, former Boeing technical pilot. He dismissed two fraud claims alleging Forkner made materially falsified communications about a crucial airplane software feature called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.

MCAS, a software function that automatically lowers the nose of an airplane in specific conditions. This was linked to two 737 MAX accidents that occurred over a 5-month span in 2018, and 2019, which resulted in 346 deaths. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), grounded the aircraft for 20 months. It was finally lifted in November 2020.

O’Connor declared Tuesday that both charges were inadmissible because they had to involve an actual part of the airplane, and not MCAS software.

“MCAS is intangible computer code in the aircraft’s flight control software,” O’Connor wrote. MCAS isn’t an ‘aircraft piece.’

O’Connor declined to drop the remaining four charges, which are wire fraud. Forkner, who was accused of conspiring to fraudulently defraud Boeing’s U.S.-based airlines customers to gain tens or millions of dollars to Boeing, was indicted on October.

The trial is scheduled for March.

Boeing reached a $2.5 Billion deferred prosecution deal with the Justice Department in January 2021 over the MAX crash, which caused more than $20B in losses to Boeing.

In a separate filing, the Justice Department stated Tuesday that Forkner has been cleared of any charges. It also said that Forkner was not being charged with “causing crashes on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302”.