He attended maintenance meetings.
Spoke with pilots.
And occasionally helped passengers when an unexpected disruption left the customer-service desk overwhelmed.
Maya grew up watching him.
Her earliest memory of the airline was sitting beneath a desk while her father argued gently with a vendor about replacement aircraft parts.
She was seven years old.
Her mother had brought her to the office after school because the family couldn't find a babysitter that afternoon.
Elijah handed her a coloring book and told her to stay where he could see her.
For an hour, she listened to grown-ups discussing schedules and invoices.
Then a flight attendant entered the office crying.
A passenger had shouted at her.
Another had accused her of stealing luggage.
And a supervisor had told her to stop complaining because the airline couldn't afford to lose customers.
Maya remembered her father standing up.
He offered the woman a chair.
Then asked what happened.
He listened carefully.
He didn't automatically assume the employee was right.
But he didn't treat her concerns as an inconvenience either.
When she finished, Elijah called the supervisor and asked for the relevant facts.
Later that evening, Maya asked why he'd spent so much time on a problem involving one passenger.
Her father looked surprised.
"Because it wasn't only about one passenger."
Maya frowned.
"What was it about?"
Elijah leaned against the kitchen counter.
"About whether people believe they can tell us the truth when something goes wrong."
She considered that.
Then asked whether the flight attendant would get in trouble.
He smiled.
"Not for telling me what happened."
For a moment, he looked toward the window.
Then added something Maya would never forget.
"An airline is dangerous when the people responsible for it are afraid to speak."
At seven, Maya didn't fully understand.
At forty-two, she would remember those words while sitting in Seat 12A with pasta dripping from her gold gown.
Maya's mother, Dr. Lorraine Washington, was a professor of economics who had built her own career through years of disciplined study.
She taught Maya to question assumptions.
When Maya came home from school repeating a claim she'd heard from someone else, Lorraine asked where the information came from.
If Maya said something was obvious, her mother asked whether she'd examined the evidence.
And when Maya complained that a teacher underestimated her, Lorraine encouraged her to respond through preparation rather than trying to win every argument.
That advice wasn't meant to excuse unfair treatment.
Lorraine believed discrimination and prejudice needed to be challenged.
But she wanted her daughter to understand that a strong argument depended on more than righteous anger.
It depended on facts.
Maya grew into an unusually observant teenager.