Since April this year the Harrier has been absent in order to be stripped down and repainted to ensure its continued preservation. It returned to Swanwick last weekend, resuming its place as the RAF(U) Swanwick Gate Guardian, only a few weeks after its 45th birthday.

Operational Safety is our most critical priority as a business, which is why we’re introducing Safety 2 – a new approach that takes a far broader view of safety improvement than we’ve ever done before.

Last week I was interviewed alongside Kevin Hightower, Aviation Chief Technologist of Lockheed Martin, as part of a live webcast on the concept of Intelligent Approach, including Time Based Separation (TBS) and Pairwise. These are the answers to some of the questions raised during the webcast.

Over the years we’ve probably all seen newspaper articles or documentaries revelling in the details of a so-called ‘near misses’, but as someone who was an air traffic controller for 14 years I can tell you that the reality is usually very different.

With airports around the UK anticipating their busiest-ever summer this year, we have just completed the roll-out of the latest development in air traffic management technology – a first in the UK.

We recently saw Farnborough Airshow take place; a biannual event at which NATS manages the air traffic. We were heavily involved in all stages of the airshow, from the pre-planning in the months leading up to the event to the authorisation of the flying displays.

The world has seen many changes since Glasgow Airport opened for commercial business in 1966, not least at the airport itself.

Air show season is an eagerly anticipated time of year and always presents the military air traffic controllers at RAF(U) Swanwick with a challenging yet extremely exciting variety of aircraft to deal with.

The introduction of remote digital control towers is a hugely exciting technological development for our industry. However, digital towers are not about removing the controller from the mix.

There are a lot of resources out there to help drone pilots to stay safe and on the right side of the law, but with the huge growth in drone flying it’s still a concern that the number of incident is on the rise.