She wanted the interior fabric changed twice, a private conference cabin added where a galley used to be, the satellite communication system upgraded, and the delivery date moved up by nearly 3 weeks to accommodate a business trip she considered non-negotiable. Rowan absorbed each change calmly, insisting only that Dorian confirm every addition through email so there would be a paper trail matching the work being done. Though Dorian consistently avoided signing any formal amendment to the original contract. Mara Ellison, the chief pilot for Blackthorne's fleet, began visiting the hangar regularly to check on the aircraft's progress. Initially skeptical that a small independent shop could handle a repair this complex without cutting corners somewhere along the way.
She had flown for Blackthorne for nearly a decade. Long enough to see several rounds of budget cuts trickle down into shortcuts on maintenance schedules that always made her uneasy. And long enough to develop a strong instinct for spotting a facility that talked a good game without the substance to back it up. Her first two visits left her unconvinced, mostly because Rowan answered her technical questions with such plain, unhurried honesty that she assumed at first he was simply being evasive about problems he did not want to admit. What she found instead was a team that treated every rivet and every weld like it mattered.
Led by a man who seemed to understand the Gulfstream structure more intimately than the manufacturer representatives, Blackthorne had flown in earlier that year. During one inspection, Rowan discovered a hairline crack buried deep beneath an older repair layer. The kind of flaw that would have gone completely undetected if the crew had simply followed the original insurance report and called it a day. Rather than patch over it and move on, he quietly authorized his team to open up a much larger section of the airframe, absorbing the additional labor cost himself rather than sending Blackthorne a change order for something he considered a basic matter of safety. Dorian was furious when he learned about the expanded scope of work, accusing Rowan of manufacturing extra tasks simply to inflate the final bill and squeeze more money out of the company.
Rowan responded not with anger, but with evidence laying out ultrasonic scan results, timestamped photographs, and a written structural analysis explaining exactly why the crack could not be safely ignored. Dorian could not dispute the data, but he pressed Rowan anyway to be, in his words, more flexible about the invoice, reminding him that Blackthorne's continued business could shape the future of his small shop for years to come. Rowan told him in the same even tone he used for nearly everything that the aircraft did not care how wealthy its owner happened to be, because metal only understood whether it was safe or whether it was not. It was around this time that Mara noticed Rowan's signature on an older set of structural repair drawings pinned to the wall of his office. Drawings that predated Hail Arrow Restoration entirely and traced back to a major aircraft manufacturer's engineering division.