NATS experienced a difficult end to 2013 following the technical problem at Swanwick that saw a loss of 10% in airspace capacity for a few hours. But, with the start of a new year comes the chance to refocus on moving forward with the positive agenda that we’ve been able to pursue over recent years.

The 2014 Commonwealth Games will see thousands of athletes and spectators flocking to Glasgow for the festival of sport – with many of them arriving by air into one of the UK’s busiest airports.

We now operate in more than 30 countries around the world. That includes providing air traffic control services at 15 airports in the UK. We’ve decided to shine a spotlight on those domestic operations and over the next few months we will be bringing you a profile of each of our UK operations. We start today with Stansted.

NATS is hosting the CANSO Global ATM Safety Conference this week. We caught up with Jeff Poole, Director General of CANSO to hear his thoughts on why this event is so important and what he hopes it will help deliver.

Next week NATS is hosting the CANSO Global ATM Safety Conference, bringing together the world’s top experts in ATM safety to share, develop and challenge our safety initiatives and strategies.

In my view, far from just being just “the people in the tower”, air traffic control is at the heart of an airport. It can help set the tone for the entire operation and can make an airport either poor or excellent.

Last weekend is normally one of our busiest at Manchester so when we were asked to fit an airshow in around the normal commercial aircraft we knew it would be a challenge.

I had the pleasure of paying a behind the scenes visit to Heathrow’s new Terminal 2 on Tuesday. I was there as part of a day organised by the airport to show some invited journalists, bloggers and spotters Heathrow’s inner workings, including NATS’ role in the control tower.

We’ve been able to measure the environmental efficiency of the aircraft in our skies for some time now, but until now we haven’t been able to extend that knowledge to planes operating on the ground at airports.

An airport is an airport, right? Wrong! Every airport has its own idiosyncrasies, foibles and operational challenges. As such, we’ve compiled a top list of what we hope are interesting titbits and trivia on the airports that NATS operates from in the UK and Gibraltar.