Over the past few years more and more effort has gone into reducing the impact that aviation has on the environment. But, even if we were able to drastically cut carbon emission tomorrow some impact from climate change is now inevitable and we need to be prepared.

Today, we announced the launch of FLOSYS, a new real time tool that will help our business better understand the environmental performance of the aircraft we provide a service to.

Martin Clifford, easyJet Base Captain at Bristol, as guest blogger, shares his thoughts about Continuous Descent Operations (CDO), which involves teamwork between the Tower, the Airport and easyJet.

One of the most important ways in which NATS seeks to help reduce the environmental impact of aviation is through the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR). SESAR brings together stakeholders from across the European aviation industry to help develop and deploy new technologies and procedures that can improve the performance of European air traffic management (ATM).

One of the SESAR projects we have led, called TOPFLIGHT, has now been long-listed for a World Responsible Tourism Award in the Best Aviation Programme for Carbon Reduction category.

During 2013 we enabled savings of 59,000 tonnes of fuel, thereby avoiding 190,000 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. It was our best ever year ever in terms of savings.

Recent changes to how we use UK airspace have enabled our airline customers to save an extra 8,000 tonnes of fuel every year. This means 13,000 tonnes of fuel savings have been enabled since April, worth £8.5m to airlines and the equivalent to 41,000 tonnes of CO2.

Last week I took part in a panel discussion on the use of technology in aviation to drive sustainability at Air Transport World’s Eco-Aviation Conference in Washington DC.

It was striking that at a conference wholly about the environment and aviation, NATS was the only ANSP represented, yet the topic of air traffic management (ATM) was seemingly on everyone’s lips.

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.