You may be wondering, what does professional football have to do with air traffic control? It might not be obvious at first, but there are a lot of similarities – not least that both are high performing, high pressure careers which require certain levels of aptitude and mentality.

Earlier this morning, we celebrated the reopening of the US to UK travellers with a spectacular synchronised, parallel take-off from Heathrow, something that’s extremely rare. But why exactly is it so uncommon, and what does it take operationally to pull it off?