Imagining the future is a tricky business. The fun part is letting your imagination run free, thinking impossible thoughts, connecting far distant dots and dreaming the sky in a new shade of blue.

During 2013 we enabled savings of 59,000 tonnes of fuel, thereby avoiding 190,000 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. It was our best ever year ever in terms of savings.

Cross-border collaboration and multi-agency working is now a necessity in the world of Air Traffic Management as we work towards delivering a Single European Sky (SES). NATS, working closely with our UK-Ireland Functional Airspace Block (FAB) partners, has just project managed the delivery of a landmark cross-border trial in support of one of the next generation of SES concepts.

A lot of questions about radar have been raised recently as people are wondering about tracking aircraft and what information Air Traffic Controllers actually see on a screen when speaking with pilots.

NATS experienced a difficult end to 2013 following the technical problem at Swanwick that saw a loss of 10% in airspace capacity for a few hours. But, with the start of a new year comes the chance to refocus on moving forward with the positive agenda that we’ve been able to pursue over recent years.

China’s Qingdao Municipal Government sent Jia Wang, Vice-Director of the Qingdao European and African Office, to Hampshire and NATS Swanwick Control Centre was on her agenda.

Last week I took part in a panel discussion on the use of technology in aviation to drive sustainability at Air Transport World’s Eco-Aviation Conference in Washington DC.

It was striking that at a conference wholly about the environment and aviation, NATS was the only ANSP represented, yet the topic of air traffic management (ATM) was seemingly on everyone’s lips.

It’s been a couple of months of positive news from the Middle East aviation industry. No-where was that more in evidence than at the 13th annual Airport Show in Dubai.