The European aviation R&D community comes to London

Next week a major European aviation conference comes to London. Aerodays is the European Commission’s flagship event in aviation research and development and takes place once during each EU Research Framework Programme – roughly every 4-5 years; the last event took place in Madrid in 2011.

The conference will see hundreds of experts from the aviation industry, from CEOs and European Commissioners through to leading technical specialists, congregating at London’s QE2 conference centre to discuss some of today’s cutting edge areas of aviation research and development.  As one of Europe’s leading Air Navigation Service Providers, NATS is proud to be deeply involved.

Time Based Separation

We are chairing two sessions – one on Safety and one on Human-Centred Systems – as well as providing speakers in two other sessions; one on Wake Vortex analysis where we’ll be discussing the recent introduction of Time Based Separation at Heathrow, and the other on Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) or ‘drones’, where we’ll be talking about Project CLAIRE – a SESAR-funded project which explores how we can integrate large-scale RPAS into controlled airspace alongside regular piloted civilian aircraft.

Copyright Thales/RichardSeymour

As a full member of SESAR – the European programme to modernise Europe’s airspace in order to improve environmental performance, safety, capacity and cost effectiveness– we’re delighted to say we’ll be demonstrating some of our SESAR-related activities on the SJU stand each day. We’re also hosting a visit of delegates to our Corporate and Technical Centre to show them how we go about our Research and Development activities.

To celebrate Aerodays and the importance of R&D to NATS, we’ll be posting a series of special blogs next week to bring to life a crucial activity that can sometimes seem just like blue-sky thinking or too technical to be tangible.

We’ll also be launching a new interactive infographic which will hopefully give you an insight into all the work we’re doing to find innovative new ways to make our skies safer, greener and cheaper to fly in, even as more aircraft need to use them. Keep an eye out here and at www.nats.aero next week; we hope you’ll enjoy the read.