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.
And the location mattered, the audience mattered, not because public accountability was a performance, but because private accountability, in this case, was insufficient. The people who had stood in that hanger and watched what happened had been carrying it. She owed them something that was real enough to be witnessed. She called Caleb on a Wednesday afternoon in late April. She had his number from the invoice.
She had not used it for anything personal, and she was aware, dialing, that this call was on a line between professional and something else, and she wasn't certain which side of it she was on. He picked up on the third ring. She could hear workshop sounds in the background, a compressor, something metallic. Sloan, he said, just her name, which meant he'd saved her number, which she registered without making anything of it. I want to ask you something, and I need you to hear the whole question before you answer, she said.
A brief pause. Okay. I want to call a companywide meeting in the main hanger, all shifts, all departments, whoever can be there. And I want to stand in the same place where I fired you and say what I should have said then. Not to fix the record, not for the board, not for press, just because it happened in front of those people and they deserve to see it addressed in front of those people.
She stopped. I want you there. That's the ask. You don't have to say anything. You don't have to participate in any way.
I just think you should be there if you want to be. The workshop sounds continued in the background. She waited. Why are you telling me first? He said, "Because it involves you and you should have the choice.
If you don't want it to happen, it doesn't happen. Another pause longer this time. It's your company, he said. You don't need my permission. No, she said, but I want it.
He was quiet for a moment that she couldn't read through a phone line. Then when? 2 weeks, a Friday morning before the first flight of the day. Okay, he said. Okay, you'll be there or okay, you understand?