Darius was grateful for the restraint. He did not want the incident to become a campaign in which every person on Flight 2280 was assigned a villain's role from fragments of information. He wanted the airline's decisions examined and the people responsible for those decisions required to explain them. That was a narrower goal than the public discussion was beginning to demand, and therefore more difficult to maintain. Anger travels faster than nuance, and the internet had no patience for the distinction between a proven fact and an emotionally satisfying assumption.
The first call with Tom Blanchard took place that evening. Darius stood by the window of his hotel room while the skyline darkened into a grid of scattered lights. Blanchard answered promptly and began by saying that he had read the latest commercial outline. His voice was warm but controlled, the voice of an executive who recognized an opportunity and did not want to sound too eager about it. Darius did not object to that. He understood that a competitor would see Caliber's difficulty as a chance to win valuable business.
"Your board moved quickly," Darius said. "We have been interested for a long time," Blanchard replied. "I won't pretend the timing isn't good for us. But I don't want to build a partnership by telling you we're kinder than someone else. I want to show you what we can actually execute."
That answer interested Darius more than the expected speech about shared values. He had heard enough polished promises in the previous day to know that a better slogan was not a better process.
Darius asked Blanchard how Ameris Sky handled internal reports of safety concerns and discriminatory treatment. Blanchard did not claim the airline was flawless. He acknowledged past complaints, a high-pressure operational environment, and the difficulty of changing behavior across airports where employees worked for different contractors. He described an independent reporting channel Ameris had established after an unrelated maintenance dispute, but admitted that its effectiveness needed external review. "We have work to do," he said. "I'm prepared to put that work in the agreement and be held to it."
The conversation then shifted to technology. Darius asked whether Ameris possessed the data architecture required for the integration and whether the company understood the expense of bringing old systems into a common planning environment. Blanchard had technical executives waiting on the call, and Darius insisted they join rather than allow the discussion to remain at the chief executive level. For nearly an hour, Anika and Mateo questioned Ameris's teams about flight schedules, cargo commitments, failure recovery, and human oversight. Their answers were not perfect, but they were concrete.
Blanchard listened as his own team admitted gaps that would require investment. He did not interrupt to polish their answers, and Darius noticed. When a network architect said a particular system could not support the data frequency Freeman Systems wanted without an expensive upgrade, Blanchard asked how long the upgrade would take. Nobody suggested hiding the limitation in a later phase. That did not prove the airline's culture was admirable, but it suggested the leadership could tolerate hearing that something was wrong.