Richard Sterling had been stealing from the airline for years.

I am not going to lay out the mechanics of how, because the mechanics of how a man loots the company that trusts him are not a thing worth teaching anyone, and because the mechanics were never the point.

The point was the shape: falsified records, corners cut in places where corners must never be cut, money siphoned out through channels dressed up to look like maintenance and safety and care, and a growing gap between the paper the airline believed and the metal that actually flew.

For years no one had looked closely enough to see the gap.