With the holiday season upon us, the coming weeks are generally our busiest time of the year. Next week we’re launching #SkyByNumbers. Every Monday we’ll be asking a new airspace related question and calling on you to guess the answer using the hashtag #SkyByNumbers. Over the next twelve weeks we will be giving away £250 to two lucky winners EACH week.

How do you squeeze a flying armada of one hundred aircraft of various vintages in and out of the world’s most complex piece of airspace? That was the question we were posed last year when the RAF asked us work with them on their 100th anniversary flypast.

I first started writing these blogs in November 2017, just before the first transition onto EXCDS – the new electronic flight strip system. Four stages of EXCDS implementation have taken place since then which I have documented on this blog – I hope this has provided you with a greater understanding of the work we do here at NATS. I can proudly say that next week, the last of our controllers will start to use EXCDS thus bringing the entire Terminal Control Operation onto an electronic platform. 

In April I attended the annual IATA Ops Conference in Ottowa, where we were able to share a vision for transatlantic flights in 2025, jointly developed by us at NATS and the Canadian air traffic service, NAV CANADA. The video we produced is aimed at an aviation audience but hopefully it gives any viewer an idea of the huge amount of work that we’re doing with NAV CANADA to transform transatlantic operations to make it safer, cleaner and far more efficient.

We are now more than halfway through transitioning the London Terminal Control Centre on to a new electronic flight strip system, EXCDS. When I last wrote on this blog in early April, we were just about to embark on transitioning the sectors that control Heathrow, Gatwick and the airspace to the South and South-East of these airports.

We caught up with Dan Townsend, the Airside Operations and Safety Manager at Southampton Airport to check how Robird is settling in.

Starting tomorrow, the sectors that control Heathrow, Gatwick and the airspace to the South and South-East of these airports will switch over to EXCDS. This is obviously a particularly busy area of airspace, covering the approach function for the UK’s two busiest airports.

Leaders in the aviation industry headed to Madrid for the sixth annual World ATM Congress last week to catch up on the latest technologies and conversations in ATC. NATS had a large presence at the event, focusing on three core themes…

We understand you launched the first drone police unit earlier this year; what was the rationale behind that?

I was frustrated while dealing with an incident that our only aerial asset, a police helicopter, was deployed on another task so I was unable to get vital aerial footage that I needed for an investigation.

Much of Britain is bracing itself for snow and ice this week as the ‘Beast from the East’ arrives from Siberia to set up residence over the UK for the next few days.