NATS Holdings

It's not going to be focused.

When the team sit down at NATS, because NATS have now got the contract to do that, and think about the third runway and everything else, they're not going to be going, right, how can we sort out this mess that is Class G airspace and reduce infringements? That's not going to be, I'd be surprised if that's even on their beginning agenda, to be honest, when they sit down and meet.

Yeah.

Prove me wrong.

Please make sure you do subscribe so you don't miss any of our future episodes.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Russ Smith, Vice President, ERX Transformation Technology at AstraZeneca, and Martin Taylor, ERP Implementation Lead at NATS.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Very good morning, Craig.

Yeah.

So, uh, I, I think, as with many things, it's a generational thing.

So, um, a lady who works at NATS called Trish Griffiths, who was very active within the UKISUG community, um, I think I was walking round the office one day and she said, uh, she said, "Do you want, do you want to lead the ERP replacement program, Martin?" And I said, "Yeah, go on then."

[laughs]

Airlines have criticized the UK's air traffic control system after a second technical problem in two weeks caused major disruption to UK flights.

EasyJet said Monday's incident once again calls into question the resilience of the service, while Wizz Air said there was a national confidence crisis in National Air Traffic Services, NATS, which runs the UK's air traffic system.

Nat said a, quote, connectivity issue at Presswick was behind the disruption across Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England and had nothing to do with a separate software defect at Swanwick earlier this month.

Swanwick.

The challenges the FAA faces, integrating new technology while maintaining continuity of operations across thousands of facilities and controllers, are not unique to America.

ENAV, the UK's National Air Traffic Services, Germany's DFS, they all face versions of the same problem.

You cannot take the system offline to upgrade it.

You have to rebuild the aircraft while it is flying.

And the North Atlantic is a really big contrail-forming hotspot.

So, um, there's a little trial about to start, which is great, from the UK government, and, um, NATS, air traffic control, and a few other groups to look at what they can do over the North Atlantic.

Um, but you know, for concerned passengers, fly by day.

That-

They shift north or south depending on where the jet stream is running on a given day, and flights are assigned specific tracks based on their departure time and destination.

The system is managed jointly by the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, NAV Canada, and the UK National Air Traffic Services known as NATS.

It is a remarkably coordinated operation that routes hundreds of flights across the Atlantic every day without conflict.

The Irish Sea portion of a Heathrow departure is the transition zone where you're leaving the UK mainland and heading toward open water.

That's right, Graham.

There's been a lot of anger, very vocal anger from airlines after yet more air traffic control system failures at NATS.

So, uh, if you cast your mind back to earlier this month on the 8th of September, there was more than 2,000 flights canceled after what NATS said later was a software issue.

Now, they said that was unrelated to previous outages, which happened in 2023 and 2025.

But then, embarrassingly, less than two weeks after that, there was another disruption when there was a connectivity issue at NATS' Prestwick facility in Scotland.

That was much smaller, but coming as it did so soon [laughs] after the, the previous issue.

I think there were around 300 flight cancellations from that.

For anyone not familiar with the UK, how that's set up, who are NATS, or what is NATS?