The final negotiations with Ameris Sky were conducted with the same scrutiny that had made Caliber's executives complain about the pace of the original deal. Shelley required confirmation that any prior discussions had created no conflicting obligation and that Caliber's confidential information would remain isolated. The engineering teams began with a clean requirements package based on Freeman Systems' own technology rather than on the proprietary documents produced during the Caliber project. Anika insisted that Ameris's network specialists identify every system that would need modification before they estimated a delivery date. The result was less dramatic than the headlines would later suggest: long calls, disputed spreadsheets, independent reviews, and a succession of revised schedules.
Ameris was eager, but eagerness was not the same as readiness. One regional cargo system could not provide the historical data quality Langford needed without additional work. A proposed maintenance feed required privacy controls, and an expected savings estimate depended on operational changes the airline had not yet funded. Tom Blanchard did not enjoy hearing those limitations, yet he instructed his people to document them rather than bury them in assumptions. Darius watched that decision with more interest than any statement about corporate values.
By Tuesday afternoon, Ameris's board had authorized a binding commercial agreement with staged obligations and conditions for each phase. The projected seven-year value matched the scale of the abandoned Caliber program: five billion dollars across licensing, technology deployment, integration, and support, subject to defined commitments and performance milestones. It was a contract ambitious enough to reorganize the competitive landscape, but it did not require either company to pretend that all five billion would arrive at once or that every technical promise had already been proven. The commercial team had negotiated a way to move decisively without abandoning the procedures meant to protect the work.
The agreement also included a governance framework that Darius and Shelley had been refining since the first Caliber negotiations. Both partners accepted independent review of high-consequence operational disputes involving project personnel, clear channels for reporting safety or discrimination concerns, and documented accountability for retaliatory conduct. There were protections for private employee information and procedures to distinguish good-faith reports from unsupported allegations. The remedies were not unlimited, and neither company promised perfection. They promised evidence, a process for correction, and consequences if the commitments were ignored.
Ruth called another board meeting to review the final package. Directors asked about the financing, data migration risks, staffing costs, and the possibility that the public would interpret the switch as an emotional response to a humiliating incident. Darius answered with the same calm detail he used for technical problems. Caliber had declined to provide the verified controls the board considered necessary, Ameris had accepted them, and the economic assessment supported the new arrangement independently of the public controversy. The public story might focus on the seat in first class, he said, but the corporate record needed to show that they had made a defensible business decision.