As we set a course for the new year, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our most popular web content for 2016; it gives us the chance to look again not just at the blog, but also our popular Discover features and the Drone Assist app.

With the Christmas and New Year celebrations already a distant memory, 2016 is shaping up as another very challenging and exciting year for both NATS and the wider aviation industry.

It will be interesting to see how the RPAS industry evolves in the coming years and what regulatory framework emerges around “drones”. The UK government has set out an ambitious strategy that wants to see the full integration of unmanned and manned aircraft by 2020, so the next few years are sure to be very exciting.

SESAR is showcasing its success stories in a number of critical areas, such as enabling greener aviation, increasing connectivity and mobility, advancing the digitalisation and virtualisation of ATM, and ensuring the safe integration of new types of aircraft, such as unmanned aircraft.

Next week a major European aviation conference comes to London. Aerodays is the European Commission’s flagship event in aviation research and development.

GPS is widely used in the transport industry, most obviously by the sat-navs in our cars, but largely due to current levels of signal accuracy and integrity being too low, we’re yet to maximise its use in the aviation industry. This is starting to change, however, with the ongoing development of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).

We are at the dawn of a third age of air traffic management, a world of airspace systemisation. It means that aircraft will again be separated procedurally, only this time based on technologies unimaginable to those pioneering pilots and controllers of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

The AMS-UK upgrade has gone live; but how does this messaging system shape communication in the aviation industry?

Engineers can imagine too! As we begin to deploy more SESAR air traffic management technologies and concepts, we are also imagining how we could further improve our services – now and in the future.

The new European Commission has indicated that they plan to review the effectiveness of existing legislation before introducing new legislation and I think that’s a good move. They could start by looking at the Single European Sky (SES) initiative.