This month Heathrow announced a new early morning arrival slot. Heathrow slots are famously rare so given it is already the busiest two-runway airport in the world, how did space for a new slot emerge? The answer lies in Big Data.

I was privileged to have the opportunity to address a distinguished audience at the Royal Academy of Engineering at their New Year Reception.

It was an occasion to showcase NATS and its vital role in the UK economy, offering a glimpse of the real air traffic control (ATC) operation today, and hypothesise on what might be seen in the future, as technologies allow us to challenge how we have always done things.

More and more young people are finishing their A levels and BTEC level 3s looking for an alternative to university. Well-structured apprenticeship schemes are increasingly popular and considered as a really positive alternative for school and college leavers who already have an idea of what they want to do.

NATS now offers an advanced engineering apprenticeship scheme to reflect this change in the marketplace.

Today we announced that NATS is now enabling annual savings of almost 1m tonnes of CO2 in UK airspace – that worth £115m a year in fuel savings to airlines.

In order to minimise the impact of space weather and prepare for its effects, NATS works closely with the Met Office and their ground-breaking new space weather centre.

As airlines work hard to reduce their fuel burn and CO2 emissions, we at NATS have also been coming up with ways to help, using air traffic control initiatives to play our part.

The #NATS365 hashtag has been used on different social media platforms since September 2014 as a means of sharing some of our favourite pictures.

Do you have a picture you would like to share with us? If so please feel free to contact me as I am always looking for more aviation related images to share with people.

There is one group of people that are often over looked when thinking about those working during the festive season; that of air traffic controllers.

What do aviation and elite sports have in common?

‘If Nike ran air traffic control, what would it look like’, explains how NATS uses techniques associated with elite sports to help its people keep the skies safe. This was the basis of a recent speech delivered at the annual Leaders Sport Performance in London, with the likes of Arsenal FC manager Arsene Wenger and former England cricket coach Andy Flower as fellow keynote speakers.

The Heathrow skyline changed forever at the end of November, when one of its most iconic features – the orange and white radar next to Terminal 1 – was removed.