It’s not every day even the President of the United States gets to have tea with The Queen, but getting him in and out of what is the UK’s busiest airport – albeit with far less traffic than normal right now – is not entirely straightforward.

After months of flights being grounded, the lockdown rules easing allowed for holidays abroad to start back up again but how did that translate into the number of flights in our skies?

Being able to detect and report the weather is important for a tower controller, so they can understand the effects it will have on the operation and procedures. This skill is even more valuable when controlling from a digital tower, where you are not actually where the weather is.

With airports so badly hit by the impact of the Covid crisis, being able to maximise the value and efficiency of existing assets – especially runways – is going to be of critical importance over the coming years as we begin to see traffic return.

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.

Creating a positive experience for customers is important in all industries, and this year’s annual AOA conference highlighted it’s no different in the aviation sector.

Digital towers are one of the hottest topics around the industry at the moment, so last week we asked our LinkedIn followers to fire their burning questions at us for us to answer. So here they are.

This past weekend, an enthusiastic team from Searidge Technologies and NATS participated in the first ever international airport {Re} Coding Aviation event in Berlin at hub:raum, a Deutsche Telekom incubator.

Our trials of a new X Band radar to mitigate the effects of wind turbines at airports have understandably excited the airport community. A debate has sparked up between different members of the industry, including a few questions that I want to take this opportunity to answer.

The growth of wind energy in the UK has posed a challenge for the aviation industry, but excellent progress has been made over the past year in finding solutions for both the en-route and airport environments.