Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

And to round off the week, today and tomorrow I'm talking to one of the most important people in aviation.

He is Martin Rolfe. He's the chief executive of NACTS, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services.

Basically, it's the Air traffic control service for the whole of

UK airspace and for a number of individual airport control towers. It's a tough job, not least,

because nobody ever wants to hear about air traffic control. We simply want to be taken smoothly to

our destination. Of course, one day when everybody heard about it was the 28th of August,

2003, you might remember it was Bank Holiday Monday, and there was an unforeseen fault in

both the main and the standby computers at Nats

resulting in, well, hundreds of thousands of people having long delays or indeed cancellations

of their flights.

Martin has been talking to me about what Nass does and about that particular day and how the organisation is learning

from experience. Nats is a private company. It's a private company with shareholders. One of

those shareholders is the government. The government has a 49% share and then the other shares

are held by pension funds and airlines, Heathrow Airport and a few others.

We operate entirely in a self-funded manner, so we get our income from airlines that fly through the UK or at airports where we operate.

What we do is we control all of the airspace broadly above 20,000 feet above the UK and across the North Atlantic, all the way until

you get halfway across where we hand over to the Canadians. And then within the UK, we do the

majority of the large airport towers. So when you go to an airport and you see a tower, it is

mostly Nats employees in there as well. In those towers, we're doing everything from the ground

up until we hand over to one of our centres, which is that national piece.

On top of that, we do a lot of work overseas.

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