Howell came to her office at 1:45. He sat down in the chair across from her desk with the expression of a man who has just witnessed something that rearranged some portion of his understanding. He ran the elevated thermal diagnostic. Howell said. Took him about 22 minutes to get the fault to present consistently.
And wiring bundle behind the secondary avionics panel, not the primary one. There's a section where the shielding braid is pinched against a structural rib. Probably happened during the last cable routing update. Someone pulled it too tight. Under elevated heat, the insulation softens just enough to let the interference bleed through.
He paused. We've been looking at the wrong panel. If we'd pulled the primary panel, we'd have found nothing and lost 2 days. Can you fix it? 3 hours, maybe four.
It's accessible once you know where to go. He looked at her. He walked through the bay once and pointed at the secondary panel. Just pointed at it. Said the fault signature on the diagnostic was consistent with a ground loop from that location.
Another pause. He hasn't worked with that specific avionics configuration before. He looked it up on his phone on the way over. Sloan looked at her desk for a moment. "Okay," she said.
"Okay," Howell agreed, though he seemed to be saying something slightly different by it than she was. She went down to the hanger at 3:00, not to check on the repair, but because she needed to see it. Not Caleb specifically, the work. She needed to see it in context. She stood near the secondary electronics bay access panel and watched Howell's team work and watched Caleb standing slightly to the side with his arms crossed and his work light in hand, not interfering, not hovering, answering questions when they were asked and not otherwise.
He caught her eye once briefly and she nodded and he looked back at the open panel. Reyes was working at a bench nearby, something unrelated to this aircraft, and she looked at Caleb and then at Sloan, and her face held something complicated in private that she didn't say out loud. The repair was completed at 6:57 in the evening. The diagnostic ran clean at standard and elevated thermal load both. Howell signed the repair documentation and shook Caleb's hand, and Caleb gathered his things.