Beyond The Horizon – R&D Showcase

Our Research and Development (R&D) department has just hosted a fantastic showcase event bringing together curious minds from across the business to showcase, explore and collaborate on the current R&D projects our teams are undertaking.

Made up of a combination of fireside chats, interactive workshops, lectures and a marketplace, the two-day event brought colleagues together to discuss the challenges facing our industry, share fresh ideas, new perspectives and to learn from each other.

Speakers covered a wide range of different topics such as our developments into Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, how we can continue to stay resilient in an ever-changing world and supporting our industry’s environmental goals through R&D projects.

Experts from various teams shared their thoughts on subjects like what the skies of the future mean for us, and how R&D is part of the process for addressing challenging business needs, creating solutions that can be deployed into our operational teams to help find resolutions for existing issues.

The team welcomed visits from our new Chairman, Warren East, our CEO Martin Rolfe and Technical Services Director Kuldeep Gharatya who opened the two-day showcase, discussing the importance of R&D and why it matters.

Workshops were held for attendees to learn more about rapid prototyping, join in with Lego serious play and sessions on design thinking, aimed at stimulating creativity and problem solving to create an innovation mindset.

In the interactive marketplace, attendees were able to see and hear about a wide range of R&D projects including finding out more about our current SESAR projects like IFAV3 (Increased Flexibility of ATCO Validations V3) and GEESE (Gain Environmental Efficiency by Saving Energy). The IFAV3 project is focussed on how increased automation can be implemented to move closer towards generic validations for controllers, whilst the GEESE project is looking at how flights over Oceanic airspace with similar flight paths can line up in formation directly behind each other to save on energy, reducing fuel consumption and emissions.

Marketplace attendees were also able to hear the latest from the Human Factors team about their current work on eye tracking which is designed to measure the human performance from eye movement to give real time data. This project is aimed at how eye movements change when a person’s workload is going up or down, making it a tactical decision-making tool that is looking to eventually be deployed into our operations.

The event was also an opportunity to present the latest updates to colleagues on our NATS Open Air project – our proposal for an integrated airspace management system designed to support the use of uncrewed aircraft such as drones or EVTOLs (Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing vehicles), creating safe and efficient travel for future users.

Visitors to the marketplace were given an opportunity to test their Air Traffic Controller skills against an AI agent with Project Bluebird. The team presented their developmental Digital Twin, which is a digital representation of UK Airspace driven by real world flight data and weather conditions. The twin provides NATS with an environment in which we can experiment with Machine Learning approaches and develop AI agents, helping us to support Air Traffic Controllers to manage the growing number of flights and the additional complexity of integrating new airspace users.

The event was a resounding success with around 1,000 recorded signups and attendees both online and in person, so much so that the R&D department are looking at taking Beyond the Horizon on the road to showcase at our other offices and are looking at dates for next year to build on their success.

If you’d like to get in-touch with us about any of the projects showcased at this event, you can do so by filling out the form on the bottom of this page.