Seventy years ago, there was a revolution in air travel. Radio Detection and Ranging – or ‘radar’ – gave air traffic controllers their eyes on the skies. They could see aircraft, in real time, anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. The truth is radar has always had one inescapable limitation – you need something solid to build one on…

The concept of satellite communication has been widely used over remote areas of airspace such as the North Atlantic, but we haven’t yet fully exploited its use over land until now.