Full payment for completed work, reimbursement for the diagnostic time and component removal that the substitution had made necessary, and an independent technical review conducted by an inspector with no prior relationship to Sterling Crown Aviation. Vivian authorized the transfer of the undisputed portion of the payment before she left the building that morning and found by noon that the transfer had been placed in a hold queue by the treasury function pending board authorization, a requirement that had never been applied to operational payments at this level in the company's history. And that could only have been imposed by someone with sufficient access to the treasury system's approval hierarchy to insert a new constraint while no one was watching. The board notification arrived that same afternoon. Sterling One was required to be operational within 48 hours or the scheduled aircraft system demonstration would be canceled.
The Orion acquisition would enter indefinite suspension and the board would convene to consider whether Vivian's management of the company's technical operations had become a liability to the transactions completion. Grant had come to understand the aircraft's role in the acquisition clearly enough to know that the demonstration was not incidental. The entire argument for the acquisition price rested on Sterling Crown's proprietary flight management technology and the demonstration was where that technology was to be shown operating under real conditions in a purpose-rebuilt aircraft that had been structurally and electronically rehabilitated to serve as the test platform. Without a legitimate release from a licensed inspector, the demonstration could not legally proceed. With a forged release, it would proceed under conditions that any competent attorney could use to void the demonstration's evidentiary value after the fact.
Grant explained to Vivian in terms she followed without needing them simplified that the uncertified actuator would pass every standard ground-level functional test because its failure mode was pressure-and-temperature dependent. The part behaved correctly at ambient conditions and only became a danger at altitude in cold air under sustained load where the alloy's thermal properties diverged from the certified component's specification in ways that would register as a transient control lag, rather than a catastrophic failure. But, a control lag in the pitch axis during a demonstration maneuver was not a small event. The only facility equipped to replicate high-altitude thermal and pressure conditions on a static component bench was the environmental test lab that the engineering department maintained. A lab that reported directly to Preston Hawthorne.