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

As with many other critical safety-based services, ATC provides a service that must be delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, so will technology ever replace the more advanced aspects of the human?

Visitors are invited to a number of technical demonstrations hosted by our experts on the following topics: Cross Border Arrival Management (XMAN), Time Based Separation (TBS), Airport Capacity Management (ACM) and Flight Optimisation System (FloSys).

The NAMEUR Task Force arrives in Dublin, Ireland for the event which runs from 29th September to 1st October 2015, with NATS once again co-chairing alongside United Airlines.

The Middle East’s aviation industry is one of the most dynamic and exciting anywhere in the world, but challenges around airspace management remain. In order for those challenges to be solved and the region’s industry to realise its full potential, airspace – the invisible but critical infrastructure – must be considered an economic asset. It is to that end that NATS commissioned Oxford Economics to assess the benefits improvements in air traffic control can deliver for the region’s economy.

For decades precision guidance for aircraft approaches have been largely one size fits all, with an Instrument Landing System (ILS) providing a single approach path to follow, but that seems set to change.

Last week the Airports Commission announced its recommendation for a new runway in the south east of England, but even with a swift and decisive verdict the prospect of any new runway in the UK is still ten years away.

From sports such as Formula 1 using real-time data to analyse performance and devise strategy through to retail and loyalty cards using big data sets to provide better experiences and offers for their customers, getting your hands on good data and using it effectively is at the heart of many of today’s industries. Real-time big data is on its way to ATM and the sooner we can make it happen, the better.

In 2011 the Spanish government decided that the time had come to open the national air traffic control sector up to competition in search of efficiency gains. New beginnings are always hard.

Now that more than 35 million passengers have passed through the airports whose air traffic is controlled by FerroNATS, and with management of over 500,000 flights under our belt, we barely have the time to look back and remember how it all started. But there was a beginning and getting from there to here required a lot of hard work. This blog looks back at the journey.

Automation has a major role to play in the future of air traffic management. People are key to the success of any automation; how they design, monitor and maintain the systems and tools available to controllers, and how those tools are used. It’s something we’re dedicating a lot of attention to and I was pleased to be invited to discuss this at a recent Flight Safety Foundation Forum in Brussels.