The board meeting in late March had gone. the way board meetings went when a CEO held her position firmly and the numbers were good enough to absorb the cost of the friction. Aldrich had written his notes and Carver had moved on and the remaining members had followed in the direction of least resistance which was usually the direction of whoever in the room was most certain. Sloan had spent 6 years cultivating that certainty as a management tool. She was still certain. She just wasn't certain about the same things anymore.
And the board hadn't entirely caught up with the difference. What they had noticed by late April was the safety metrics. The internal safety reporting had increased by 31% in the first quarter since Sloan had revised the protocol. Not because more things were going wrong, but because people had started reporting things that had always been going wrong and previously hadn't been worth the paperwork and the potential blowback. Three minor issues that would have sat unressed for weeks got caught and resolved in their early stages.
The maintenance review cycle that Caleb's replacement protocol had inspired. She had taken his documentation style and formalized it into a companywide standard with Howell's input was already cutting fault discovery time in the avionics and hydraulics departments. Carver called to say the numbers looked promising. Sloan thanked her and meant it only partially because she knew the numbers were a reflection of something that had cost more than a quarterly metric could capture. And she wasn't ready to let the board feel good about it as though they'd been part of the decision.
But the numbers were real, and she was glad they were real because they made the next thing she was planning harder to argue against. She had been thinking about the gathering for 6 weeks before she decided to do it. The idea had come to her oddly, not in the office, but in the breakroom on a morning when she'd been sitting with Reyes and Park and two other technicians she'd been getting to know, a man named Oay from the structural inspection team and a younger woman named Britta who worked electrical systems and had a habit of explaining things with her hands in a way that was somehow both technical and completely clear. They had been talking about an incident from 3 years ago involving a landing gear irregularity that had been caught late in a pre-flight sequence too late for comfort early enough to avoid disaster. And as they talked, Sloan had noticed the way the story moved between them.
The way each person held a piece of it, the way the sequence of events had lived in four separate memories and been assembled right there over coffee into something complete. None of them had been credited in any official documentation. The incident report named the department. The department was represented in the relevant board summary by the department head who had written the cover page. Sloan had listened to them reconstruct a near miss from 3 years ago that she had been briefed on in a two paragraph executive summary and had felt clearly and uncomfortably the weight of everything she had been reading and not reading and choosing to understand only in its processed simplified form.
The gathering had started forming in her mind. Then she thought about it the way she thought about difficult operational decisions. Turning it over, testing it from different angles, looking for the points where it could go wrong. It could feel performative. It could come across as the kind of public gesture that a PR team would recommend and an executive would execute without actually changing anything underneath it.
It could embarrass Caleb in a way that was its own kind of disrespect. It could go sideways in any number of directions that she couldn't fully predict. She kept coming back to the fact that it had started in the hangar. Whatever she needed to say, not to manage the situation, not to close a loop with HR, not to satisfy the board's concern about optics. It had started in that specific room in front of those specific people.