In March easyJet invited friends and family into their HQ at London Luton Airport to give them a behind the scenes look into the world of aviation. It’s an important occasion where guests get an insight into what goes on behind closed hangar and cockpit doors.

This week Europe’s aviation community gather for the European Commission-sponsored Aerodays conference. It’s a major event that only takes place once every few years to develop innovative concepts and technologies that will help ensure the aviation can grow, safely and sustainably, and to discuss emerging issues.

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

The CEOs of five of Europe’s largest airlines have recently come together to lobby the European Commission for reforms. One of the calls made by the CEOs was for the Commission to address the slow pace on delivering the Single European Sky.

Friday 24th July was expected to be the busiest day of the year. Rather than just looking at statistics for the day we thought it would be interesting to put some faces to those who flew on #FlyFriday.

Last weekend saw the Royal International Air Tattoo, or ‘RIAT’, celebrate air power from around the world and the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, with a stunning three day airshow.

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.

For anyone who have seen the film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, it’s easy to think that it is nothing more than a wartime love story (although it does have an interesting metaphysical theme). However, to aviators it is likely to mean just a little bit more.

At Heathrow we have a great relationship with London’s Air Ambulance team at the Royal London Hospital. I was recently asked to speak at a human factors symposium organised by London’s Air Ambulance Institute of Pre-Hospital Care at the Queen Mary University of London’s Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

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.