For many years the default position for big public consultations has been to have a consultation document buttressed by a range of engagement processes, most notably public roadshows. The pandemic has made us rethink how we approach a consultation, and it has resulted in a more effective approach that now might well become the new default position. 

There’s no doubt that this is a year like no other. And while Covid-19 means that there are far fewer planes in the sky right now, our controllers and planning teams have still been preparing for Remembrance Day to ensure that we can honour our wartime heroes without interruption. The pandemic has resulted in the […]

Happy International Day of the air traffic controller, our favourite day of the year!

At NATS, every day is a day to celebrate the amazing work that our controllers do, but we always like doing something extra special on October 20th.

This morning you might have seen British Airway’s last two Heathrow based B747s head off to retirement including a stunning low-level go-around over the airport, but how do you pull something like that off?

How we build back better is at the forefront of many people’s minds. But it is wrong to assume that it is only the pandemic that has spurred this action from the aviation industry. In fact, it has only accelerated the work that was already happening to improve the sustainability of flying.

In our response to the impact the pandemic is having on the aviation industry, we have prioritised protecting operational jobs to ensure we have the capacity to manage traffic when it returns. However, the industry is not predicting a return to 2019 traffic levels until 2024 or even 2025, which means painful decisions cannot be avoided. 

Airports, that up until this year were worried about how they were going to meet the seemingly ever-increasing demand to fly, are now facing the kind of operational challenges most would have never imagined.

The voting is over. The poll is closed. The hustings are at an end. After weeks of searching for the definitive answer to what is the greatest single technological innovation in the history or air traffic control, we have an answer.

Since March, we have all been impacted in some way by the measures and changes that we have had to make in response to COVID-19. Our suppliers have also been impacted and their response during this time has been a real testament to the strong relationships we have built over the years

This week I spoke at The Journey Towards Autonomy in Civil Aerospace event organised by the Aerospace Technology Institute, addressing the challenges of fully automating ATM.   We tend to think of autonomous things as being about self-driving cars or machines doing things without any human input, but automation is something we are now becoming used to in our everyday lives. From our phones making suggestions for us, to our TVs automatically recording […]