An ‘invisible infrastructure’, with ‘huge motorways in the sky’. When NATS released its UK 24 video, it showed just how many flights are up in that invisible infrastructure on a daily basis.

Smarter and more collaborative working is the best way to be efficient and ensure we can be sustainable as an industry.

National Women in Engineering Day (NWED) was set up to raise the profile and celebrate the achievements of women in engineering. Our blog series “women in engineering” has featured several of our female engineers over the last year. Today, for NWED, we look at another of our female engineers, Fiona McCluskey, NATS’ Duty Engineering Officer (DEO) based at Aberdeen Airport.

A good proportion of us will take to the skies over the next few months to reach our holiday destinations and will expect the flight to and from your paradise to be without drama.

In the world of air traffic control, we have that same desire and work particularly hard to realise that expectation, even with growing air traffic levels and increased demand.

Last week you might have seen the story about our project looking at whether TV transmissions could one day be used as a replacement for radar. I’m delighted with the interest the project has generated, but thought there was scope to give a deeper explanation of the technology behind the headlines.

The UK is one of the few countries around the world with a joint and integrated civil and military air traffic control service, with NATS and MoD controllers sitting side by side in the control centre at Swanwick, Hampshire.

This close relationship allows greater cooperation and the more flexible use of airspace. But what is the difference between civil and military ATM and how do they work together on a day to day basis?

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.

Safety is always a key consideration and Aberdeen has supported the adoption of Wide Area Multilateration technology, which uses signals from transmitters and receivers fitted to oil and gas platforms to track offshore flights.

Hear what John Millar, NATS’ General Manager at Aberdeen Airport, has to say about the service his team provides to both fixed wing aircraft and the numerous helicopters in the latest Tower Tour video.

The aviation community has long argued that having the highest flight tax in the world makes the UK less competitive than our European counterparts. We are likely to see changes in demand as a result of further APD reform.