I was talking to someone a couple of months ago who was closely involved at the time, but is no longer connected. He reckoned that the whole revenge agenda against Loganair had been cooked up by the Chairman and then supported or at least not challenged by COW. Flybe had apparently lost around £5 mln of income with Loganair on side and the losses from the competition were nearly double that, so they had gone from plus £5 mln to about minus £15 mln on the whole thing. It was so bad that they were having crisis meetings at least twice a week and sometimes daily to try to work out what to do next. I bet that £15mln would have come in handy over the last few weeks but it was burned over a year ago.
It does sound like there were several people whose job was to shield the Chairman and CEO from bad news and make sure that they were teflon coated so nothing going wrong stuck to them. I've heard the words "self interest" quite frequently. Easy to say with hindsight but the warning signs were out there though. Blaming last autumn's results on high fuel costs when their own financial statements said 91% of fuel had been hedged was a bit rich.