Getting Rid of Email

Executive Summary / TLDR (too long didn’t read):

Email is one of our biggest problems. There are reasons why it became so popular and there are reasons why its time is over. The future lies in a new way of communicating - shifting from people-based to machine-based communication, using a single source of truth and exchanging information in real-time, without email.

Email is getting seriously out of hand.

The head of a Civil Aviation Authority I was recently speaking to told me he was afraid of going on vacation because he wouldn’t be able to cope with the flood of emails after his return.

Similarly, an operator reported that for a recent trip to Africa, they exchanged more than 1200 emails for that single trip.

Another operator said that for a three leg trip they had received 370 customer-driven changes, all communicated over email. They also mentioned that they increasingly experience problems with their shared mailboxes in Outlook due to the amount of data these are holding.

Yet another operator creates email threads whenever there is an aircraft maintenance issue. The’d put around 10 people on CC and then start discussing every detail while everyone’s receiving those messages.

But apparently there are also unconventional ways to deal with the problem: a Head of Maintenance I spoke to went the other way, he made a „select all - delete“ move after returning from vacation to get rid of that problem :-)

Some companies have at least made efforts for workers to stop receiving emails after work: emails would not be delivered to a worker’s desk / mobile device after a certain time in the day to give them some peace. In aviation however that is not a realistic solution, we operator 24/7 in all time time zones, worldwide.

Nevertheless the truth is that we can’t keep up with the amount of emails we receive anymore. How many people do you know who regularly get to „inbox zero“ at the end of a day ?

Email is easy, fast and cheap

Looking back, why did we have email in the first place ? There is no doubt that email was a huge improvement compared to telex, fax, and letters because it was a lot more convenient, cheaper and faster. If there is technology available which is easy to use and at the same time does the job faster and at lower price, people will adopt it.

Email even replaced a lot of phone calls, but for a different reason. Email is asynchronous. This means that you can send your message to the receiver and he or she will deal with your message when convenient - you don’t get interrupted with what you are currently doing (if you are doing email right!). So while the sender can clear his mind by sending out a message, the receiver can deal with it and get back to you when he/she has time.

The good old phone call is more intrusive: the receiver gets interrupted and has to focus on you - probably a reason why a lot of people switch off their phone when they are trying to get something done in a phase of deep work. Sometimes you even have a phone call with somebody and the person would ask you to send a quick email with the gist of what you have just discussed - these people use their email system as a to do list. It’s actually not meant to go to inbox zero, it’s their way of keeping a to do list.

And there is another reason for email: „CYA - cover your ass“. In today’s world a lot of people appreciate the paper trail emails generate, they can always go back and check what has happened and why something did not go as planned.

The negative side of email

That said email also creates misunderstandings. I was involved in flying a trip to Tahiti a few years ago. When the passengers arrived at the departure airport they brought a dog with them, which they expected to take with them to Tahiti. However, neither the crew nor the company was aware so the trip was cancelled eventually due missing paperwork for the dog. It turned out that email did two things here: it allowed the operator to go through the messaged finding out that the mishap was caused by miscommunication, but hadn’t they relied entirely on email they would have most probably been aware of the dog.

Email became so easy and widely used that are overdoing it. Who hasn’t been in the situation in which you are part of an email discussion with several emails and you have lost the overview of what the actual status was. You repeatedly have to go trough all the emails and reverse engineer the discussion to actually find out.

Information wrapping

Another downside of communicating over email is „information wrapping“. Say you have asked an FBO for a cost estimate for your next tech stop - via email of course. What you get in return is an a return email which holds the information in an excel sheet. So the sender has wrapped the information - the cost - in some nice packaging (the Excel sheet) and has then put that in an envelope (the email) to send it to you. If you want to know what the tech stop is going to cost you, you first have to find the email, open it and then open the Excel sheet - if you can from your mobile zoom. It probably also involves some sort of zooming exercise. They may have even added some free text which is ambiguous in nature and raises other questions. Thinking this differently, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just make the information we want send appear on the receiver’s screen, and possibly even in a way the receiver would like to see it, without the emailing ? The answer is yes, so please bear with me.

Curing the symptoms

We have built tools to send emails faster, and we have built tools to read emails faster. We have even started to include AI to respond to emails on our behalf so we don’t have to do it. However, this does not solve the root of the problem. The way we currently communicate using email, we send out unstructured information which the receiver has to translate and structure to make sense of it - or even reverse engineer.

How we currently work: people-based communication using email

So how can we communicate better ? Is there a way to improve the quality and structure of a message so that it becomes less ambiguous and more complete in a way that the probability of not understanding it correctly is reduced ?

Standardize Communication

At JetManager, we believe that this is possible by standardizing communication. When using email, we put the human being in the center of all communication. The human writes a message with all typos and ambiguities, and the receiver has to make sense of it. If you keep doing this the whole day, this is energy-draining and exhausting.

Instead we should move away from „free text communication“ to a data-focused communication for essential, repetitive messages via standardization. Think of making a trip request for example. If the sender and the receiver agree on how to send a message, the data in must contain and how it’s being sent, both parties will easily understand it. Even better, their respective software systems can deal with the message without „human translation“ needed.

Think of the following example: Business Aviation is complex, but in its core, it’s actually the same thing over and over again. OK - certainly not during COVID but that points to whole different problem which is real-time access to accurate essential (government) data.

Anyway, while the business is extremely dynamic and we - by nature of the business - receive lots of special requests and customer-driven changes, essentially our product offer is to fly safely from A to B while providing the highest possible level of service. In order to do that we need a serviceable aircraft, crew, FBOs, fuel, permits, catering, airport slots, and a flight plan. A few more things obviously but you get where I am going. Requesting handling is aways the same. Finding a route and filing a flight plan is always the same. Obtaining permits and checking the aircraft maintenance status is always the same. So if I have a system in place which lets both sender and receiver communicate with each other exchanging predefined and known data points, the people have a lot less to think about - and to type.

That however means that - to standardize communication - we need to produce a standard data set. Say I am an aircraft owner and I want to fly next week. There is a set of data to send to transmit all the necessary information, but we know what these data points, are, don’t we ? What we do not want is to send such a request via free text (email) anymore, because the sender may not be accurate enough in composing the message and the receiver has to make sense of it and possibly can’t.

So if we find a way to standardize message exchange in a way both the sender and the receiver expect and understand, we have made a big step forward in reducing ambiguity and email volume. Software and APIs („Application Programming Interfaces) are the technologies that do that for us.

JetManager and Leon Software

In JetManager, you can enter a trip in seconds. When you log in, the app knows who you are, it knows which aircraft you own / have access to and it knows where they currently are. It also knows crew availability and the full maintenance history and resulting serviceability. By using speech recognition, you can just tell it where you want to go and when. Add passengers and load new ones using AI passport scanning technology if you feel like it.

The trip request then shows up in Leon scheduling system a few seconds later. There the operator confirms and builds the trip until it’s ready to fly, giving the aircraft owner full transparency of that process in real-time without having sent / received a single email.

Now there’s a customer-driven schedule change. Since our product offering is ad hoc flying, anytime, anywhere, that’s what we do, work the changes. Our own research has shown that on average, every flight changes 5.7 times. So for a three leg trip, you can expect 18 changes - on average. If you do not have any changes for that one three-leg trip, expect 36 changes for the next one. So it’s not about creating a trip, anybody can do that - it’s about keeping up with the changes.

Efficient Network Communication

If we look at the big picture, we have a network of internal departments and external third parties working together on making a trip a possible - we all know who they are.

Nevertheless there are different angles and different views in that picture. Think of a bird eye’s view for the customer, who mainly wants to know if everything is good to go - or why not. The operator wants to know it all(departure, inflight, destination), while a service provide has a very local interest being located either at point of departure or destination. Every party involved requires a different level of granularity and information depth, different views of the same trip and data. But they all have one thing in common: if they can, they prefer real-time data from a single source, right onto their screens.

So what we need for such a network to work is a single source of truth - a single system in which every node in the network can contribute, add / correct information, and potentially see it all, in real-time. When there’s change, such a change get’s highlighted to everyone else in the network in real-time, without email. That said, the network can be permissioned, so it can be controlled if participants can only view, what they can view, or if they are allowed to edit information.

That in turns means that a business process within the network needs to be defined. What information do I want to send, when and to whom? What response do I expect? What do I do if something goes wrong ? If a message is sent in a format and structure which is expected by the receiver, it can and will be understood it much faster - in fact it can be injected into their very own software system automatically. That is in contrast to email, with which a person has to stop what he / she is currently doing, read the email, understand it, and then manually transfer the information.

The Future

Taking a bird eye’s view of our industry: what are our biggest pain points operationally? It’s email, keeping up with the changes, and having access to the latest information, in real-time.

The JetManager Digital Aircraft Mobile Application solves these issues today. It allows the aircraft owner and the operator to communicate entirely emailless with full transparency of what’s going on. And if you are running Leon Software, all client-initiated trip requests will appear directly on your screen - emailless, and you can then for example request handling for your trip from Jetex via their seamless system to system connection - again, without sending a single email.

The solution to make our industry more efficient is this:

A: a single source of truth - everyone looks at the same data.
B: Communication within the network in real-time, without email.

So how do you get started ?

Think about your work. In which areas do you have repetitive communication patterns, situations when you exchange the same type of information over and over again - a trip schedule change or sending out a handling request, for example. Then think of the communication part: where do you send that information ? What would be needed for the receiver’s system to process your message without human intervention ?

Naturally there are still plenty of creative problem solving skills required to sort problems which have never happened before. In such a situation, is email the right choice? Maybe, but maybe it’s also a phone call with everyone which could get you to the solution faster and more effectively.