He asked that payment be made to the full crew of Hollis Aero Works, not to him individually, because the work had been theirs equally, and the hardship of the past several days had been theirs equally as well. Vivian signed the payment authorization in front of the board without discussion and pushed it to the company treasurer. Preston, as he was escorted from the room by two members of Dana's team, looked at Grant and said he had nearly destroyed a perfectly good business over a component the size of a thermos. Grant said that a component the size of a thermos installed in the wrong position could put two pilots and six passengers into the ground without warning and that the aircraft did not know or care how small the failure was, only whether it had been properly addressed before the wheels left the pavement. The federal investigation that followed took 11 months and produced charges against Preston Hawthorne covering procurement fraud, embezzlement, falsification of aviation maintenance records, destruction of safety-critical evidence, interference with a regulatory investigation, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a list that grew as investigators worked backward through the Altair relationship and found the component substitution scheme at Sterling Crown was not the first of its kind, only the most recent.
Ellis Ward entered into a cooperation agreement with the prosecution from the first formal interview, and the terms he received reflected the law's distinction between a man who executed instructions under sustained pressure and a man who issued those instructions for personal enrichment. Ellis faced civil liability and professional disqualification. Preston faced a criminal trial before a jury. Sterling Crown terminated every supply relationship connected to the Alter network within 30 days, commissioned an independent audit of every component in its fleet over the preceding 3 years, and replaced its internal procurement oversight with a structure in which component sourcing verification reported directly to the full board, bypassing the operational management chain entirely. Vivian issued a formal policy statement she drafted herself without input from the legal department.
No member of executive management was permitted to pressure a certificated maintenance inspector to modify or accelerate a safety determination. All components above a defined value threshold required independent verification before installation, and any person holding safety of flight responsibility had unconditional authority to ground an aircraft without management approval. The policy was posted at the entrance of every Sterling Crown facility, only the words in plain type in a location where no one entering could miss them. The work of restoring Sterling One to proper condition was straightforward in the way that work is always straightforward when there is no pressure attached to the outcome and no deadline imposed by someone whose interest in the result is financial rather than technical. Grant removed the substitute actuator, sourced the genuine certified replacement from the original manufacturer with complete documentation and a full material test report, and then conducted a comprehensive re-inspection of every system he had rebuilt.