The Authority Gradient

Last week, Michael Comyn made the case for silence. This week, the exception — because there's a second kind of silence, the sentence that was formed, weighed, and then never said. Aviation has a name for the conditions that produce it: the authority gradient, the slope of rank and reputation that information has to climb to reach the person in charge. On a first officer who hinted four times instead of shouting once, on the three words a captain said that saved a hundred and eighty-five people, and on why we, in this country, are world-class at not quite saying the thing.