Looking ahead to smoother skies and swifter journeys
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Kathryn Leahy, chief operations officer for the air-traffic control service, Nats. We talked about the impact of bad weather – such as Storm Bram – on air-traffic control. And looking ahead, how “performance-based navigation”will make journeys more punctual.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday, |
| 0:05.2 | the 11th of December, looking ahead to the wonders that will be brought to travel in 2026 and beyond. |
| 0:14.1 | And today I'm talking to Catherine Leahy. She is the chief operating officer for Nats, the Air Traffic Service that looks after all flights |
| 0:24.2 | to from and over the UK and also at most of the UK airports. So quite a tricky job |
| 0:30.9 | having to look after all that, isn't it? It's a wonderful job actually because it's so exciting. |
| 0:37.1 | Without us, we wouldn't have an airport and we wouldn't have aircraft. So it's absolutely imperative that we provide the services that we do. So we have 11% of the European airspace, but we service over 24% of the traffic. We operate 15 airport towers in the UK and we do the entire |
| 0:58.2 | overflights of the entire UK and out over the North Atlantic as well. It's a fantastic job. |
| 1:05.3 | Except when the weather goes wrong, for instance, which it has over the last couple of days due to |
| 1:09.7 | Storm Bran. We've seen dozens and |
| 1:12.5 | dozens of cancellations, particularly between Great Britain and Ireland over the Irish Sea. Presumably, |
| 1:19.8 | when things start going wrong, and I've been following, for instance, a Ryan air flight from |
| 1:24.6 | Stanssted to Cork, which then had to divert. We've had all kinds of problems. |
| 1:30.6 | How much extra pressure does that put on the men and women who are looking after the skies? |
| 1:35.5 | Well, their primary focus is the safety of the people who are flying, and therefore they take |
| 1:41.5 | their roles extremely seriously. |
| 1:47.1 | And what we do is we slow the traffic down. |
| 1:50.5 | So on a bad weather day, we apply what's called regulation. |
| 1:54.6 | And when you are on a flight and you might hear the pilots say, |
| 1:56.7 | we are caught up in air traffic regulation, |
| 2:04.3 | that's usually because we're applying that regulation for safety reasons. And bad weather is usually the reason that we do that. So big storms are very, very well practiced and the team take it very |
| 2:11.6 | seriously. There is no aircraft that wants to fly through really bad turbulence or have bumpy landings. |
| 2:18.3 | Passengers want to feel safe on board and there's lots of nervous flyers out there. |
... |
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