Page 2 of Gryphon

Despite the appearances his presidency required, he sat far more comfortably around a half-rebuilt engine with his team, sharing falu sausage sliced with a greasy mechanic’s knife and eaten on black bread with mustard.

Why had he left the line?

Because it hurt him to see what others were doing to the airline. Even as a kid fresh out of airframe and powerplant school, he could see it. He’d joined, led, then left behind the mechanics.

But he hadn’t forgotten his roots. Not long after he’d solved the worst of the messes from the prior administration, Airbus had come around with an offer of quality planes and massive EU-subsidized discounts. Locally-sourced parts, a single primary platform, and a focus down to only two brands for the short-haul connectors. It was heaven. The bottom line cleaned up as parts and training had harmonized around fewer and fewer variables.

It had taken twenty-five years.

And in nine days it would have been done. He’d planned to retire the day after the Boeing 737 and hand off the reins to a clean-running thoroughbred. He’d led LuftSvenska through the great pandemic intact—not furloughing a single crewmember or team lead. They’d come out healthier than they’d gone in.

LuftSvenska had picked up routes that others couldn’t service. In addition to all of Scandinavia and much of Europe, they now flew nine prime US routes connecting Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm to New York, Chicago, and Denver.

Perhaps the old 737 hated him on principle.

He had been the one to make sure it was the last of its kind at the airline. A poor service job on the last rare bird?

No, the line guys wouldn’t have let him down. The first thing he’d done on taking over was a salary bump and double the training budget for the line staff. Every minute a plane wasn’t aloft cost a small fortune. Investing in keeping the aircraft aloft, and simplifying the workload to make it happen, had paid bigger dividends than any other single action he’d taken in twenty-five years.

And this was his reward.

It wasn’t enough that the 737 had gone down in the largest single loss-of-life event in LuftSvenska’s history. That had been the first awful call.

This wasn’t only the first moment he’d had a chance to sit and think in the last two hours. It was the moment he could finally feel! All those dead, by his airline’s hands. All he’d really achieved in his hours on the phone was to delay imaging the dead.

And this final call had been one too many in a day of horrid news.

He’d hoped for a rapid, unbiased investigation. Maybe even one that could be done before he left office so that he wouldn’t be dumping this on the next president.

But rather than wrapping it up nicely and putting a neat bow on it in proper Swedish fashion, the SHK—Swedish Accident Investigation Authority in English, the “Breakdown Commission” Haverikommission in Swedish—had already declared the crash as problematic. They’d at least had the courtesy to inform him before they called in the US National Transportation Safety Board.

The bloody Americans.

The only good news was that they had a team attending the International Society of Air Safety Investigators conference in Reykjavik. Only two hours away once they were on a plane.

He’d been a keynote speaker for the ISASI a couple years back, on a panel with United, Delta, Quantas, and Lufthansa. The other airline presidents had warned him not to stick around for the rest of the conference, but he’d ignored the advice.

It was the scariest four days of his life.

These people listened to lectures on every topic from atypical structural failures to improper software behavior to patterns of CFITs, controlled flights into terrain (known among his old mechanic’s crowd as PFUs, pilot fuck-ups). Each conference session had been about ten times as horrific as it sounded. And now LuftSvenska Flight 1308 would become another presentation at a future ISASI conference.

For ages after attending that conference, he’d had waking nightmares every time a flight took to the air. He could picture fifty new and horrifyingly spectacular ways a plane might come back down: wet runways, bird strikes, FOD (foreign object debris) ingestion by an engine at takeoff… The list had been unending.

But calling in the Americans? They were so brash. They certainly didn’t need paparazzi over there; Yanks were their own most vocal selves. Still, he understood SHK’s reasons. With LuftSvenska phasing out Boeing aircraft over the last twenty-five years, very few of the Swedish investigators had deep experience with them. Hardly anyone in Scandinavia did anymore. And even less experience with them crashing.

Maybe it was a sign he hadn’t retired soon enough.

He should have stepped away when Gertrude had wanted to do that knitting cruise last spring. He’d have kicked back and read a book or drunk himself blind in the ship’s bar.

No, instead he’d decided to stay on until the last step of standardizing the fleet and operations was complete.

The old 737 was already sold to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they’d fly it until it either lost the ability to take off or dropped out of the sky. Which wouldn’t take long to happen down there. They didn’t believe in maintenance; just use it until it broke, then move on. It was an ignominious ending for such a fine plane—it had performed flawlessly throughout his entire career as airline president—but a typical end in today’s market.

Not anymore. Today the 737 once again counted as his problem, not the DRC’s.

Nine days until his retirement.

There existed no chance that this mess be done in time for Hanna Berg’s takeover.

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