The emails I have seen cover a wide range of operational, safety, personal, marketing, scheduling, strategy and commercial issues and should be printed off and made mandatory reading by airline executives and regulatory authority managers.
I guess they all have a common theme: "Innovation and enthusiasm are wonderful but don't try and re-learn every lesson already known to your employees and remember that almost all aviation's lessons were paid for in blood, bankruptcy or both"
Perhaps many managers whose learning was done via business school computer screens and whiteboards have never had that exquisite feeling of anguish when you tighten and screw just one quarter turn too much and strip the thread, often skinning a knuckle at the same time! Even worse, when ill-advised over tightening breaks off an exhaust manifold stud and you have to drill it out. Squeezing until something gives is not a practice that has any place in peacetime aviation. That certainly doesn't mean giving up on continuous improvement: it does mean don't waste opportunities for learning from the people involved and for executives and subordinates alike: "So far so good" in both business and safety, is the credo of fools.
I can offer little contribution to the situation except good wishes, and as a thinking piece, the following excerpt from a letter written by Admiral Nimitz to the entire Pacific Fleet after the swashbuckling Admiral Halsey ill-advisedly took the Third Fleet through a typhoon off Luzon in 1944, sinking 3 destroyers, damaging 9 other warships and costing 790 lives and 100 aircraft. Sorry its a bit of a read but I suggest it's worth it for executives and sub-ordinates reflecting on just exactly how tightly the business, safety and industrial screws should be turned:
"The safety of a ship against perils from storm, as well as from those of navigation and maneuvering, is always the primary responsibility of her commanding officer; but this responsibility is also shared by his immediate superiors in operational command since by the very fact of such command the individual commanding officer is not free to do at any time what his own judgment might indicate. Obviously no rational captain will permit his ship to be lost fruitlessly through blind obedience to plan or order, since by no chance could that be the intention of his superior. But the degree of a ship's danger is progressive and at the same time indefinite. It is one thing for a commanding officer, acting independently in time of peace, to pick a course and speed which may save him a beating from the weather, and quite another for him, in time of war, to disregard his mission and his orders and leave his station and duty.
It is here that the responsibility rests on unit, group, and force commanders, and that their judgment and authority must be exercised. They are of course the ones best qualified to weigh the situation and the relative urgency of safety measures versus carrying on with the job in hand. They frequently guard circuits and possess weather codes not available to all ships; and it goes without saying that any storm warnings or important weather information which they are not sure everybody have received should be re-transmitted as far as practicable. More than this, they must be conscious of the relative inexperience in seamanship, and particularly hurricane seamanship, of many of their commanding officers, despite their superb fighting qualities. One division commander reports that his captains averaged eight years or less out of the Naval Academy, and this is probably typical.
It is most definitely part of the senior officer's responsibility to think in terms of the smallest ship and most inexperienced commanding officer under him. He cannot take them for granted, give them tasks and stations, and assume either that they will be able to keep up and come through any weather that his own big ship can; or that they will be wise enough to gauge the exact moment when their tasks must be abandoned in order for them to keep afloat. The order for ships to be handled and navigated wholly for their own preservation should be originated early enough by the seniors, and not be necessarily withheld until the juniors request it. The very gallantry and determination of our young commanding officers need to be taken into account here as a danger factor, since their urge to keep on, to keep up, to keep station, and to carry out their mission in the face of any difficulty, may deter them from doing what is actually wisest and most profitable in the long run.
Yet if the Officer in Tactical Command is to be held responsible for his smaller vessels, he must be kept aware of their conditions, and the onus of this rests on the commanding officers themselves. Each of them must not only do whatever he is free and able to do for his ship's safety, but must also keep his superiors in the chain of command fully informed as to his situation. If there is anything in his ship's particular condition or in the way she is taking the weather that worries him, he should not hesitate to pass the information to his seniors. To let this be regarded as a sign of faint- heartedness is to invite disaster, and seniors should indoctrinate their commanding officers accordingly. Going still further, it has been shown that at sea the severity of the weather may develop to a point where, regardless of combat commitments of the high command, the situation will require independent action by a junior without reference to his senior. This becomes mandatory if grave doubts arise in the mind of the junior as to the safety of his vessel, the lives of its crew, and the loss of valuable government property and equipment.
In conclusion, both seniors and juniors alike must realize that in bad weather, as in most other situations, safety and fatal hazard are not separated by any sharp boundary line, but shade gradually from one into the other. There is no little red light which is going to flash on and inform commanding officers or higher commanders that from then on there is extreme danger from the weather, and that measures for ships' safety must now take precedence over further efforts to keep up with the formation or to execute the assigned task. This time will always be a matter of personal judgment. Naturally no commander is going to cut thin the margin between staying afloat and foundering, but he may nevertheless unwittingly pass the danger point even though no ship is yet in extremis. Ships that keep on going as long as the severity of wind and sea has not yet come close to capsizing them or breaking them in two, may nevertheless become helpless to avoid these catastrophes later if things get worse. By then they may be unable to steer any heading but in the trough of the sea, or may have their steering control, lighting, communications, and main propulsion disabled, or may be helpless to secure things on deck or to jettison topside weights. The time for taking all measures for a ship's safety is while still able to do so. Nothing is more dangerous than for a seaman to be grudging in taking precautions lest they turn out to have been unnecessary. Safety at sea for a thousand years has depended on exactly the opposite philosophy"
Admiral Chester Nimitz