Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 21st of November.

We're now on to the second part of my conversation with Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Nats,

formerly National Air Traffic Services, the controllers who keep us safe in the skies.

We're talking today about the future of air traffic control and we're starting with something I experienced a few weeks ago when I was flying from

Newcastle to London Heathrow. There was a delay I think due to waiting for a slot. Obviously all of this is within your

control if I may. And then secondly, we did a couple of circuits over the home counties. And I thought,

why am I not living in a world where we are told take off at this minute, this particular second,

and we guarantee you will be able to fly straight to Heathrow and land. It just seems on a little flight like that, you might be able to do that. So I think technically you could do it, but if you think about it, you're mixing in traffic from out of area. So that same time of your flight, it came now from Newcastle. So the reason it missed its slot could be any number of reasons, right? It may have been the previous turnaround, may have been technical issues, whatever. Once it's missed its slot, then we will fit it in at a later point. Obviously, airlines are incentivised to push back on time, because that's when the EU-261 clock starts ticking, so they will push back and leave as soon as they can. We will try and make sure it scheduled in, but if you think about

it, Heathrow is so constrained that the only way to make sure the runway is in use every second

is to have at least a number of aircraft effectively circling ready to come in. So you could do

exactly what you said and schedule it precisely to the minute, but you'd have to do it for everything.

And of course, we don't control

when aircraft take off in, say, Austin, Texas or in Bangkok. They will take off when they take

off. They're on the way, so we would have to sequence all of that in as they're flying in order

to make it work. But what you've described is the utopia that we will be striving for in the long

run. Strikes me, the combination of AI and increasingly sophisticated systems and just being

able to say to the British Airways captain in Austin, right, you've got to take off at 143

GMT or whatever. That should be working. Of course, it is incredibly complex, but if I may, what I'm hearing is

you need to have a queue of aircraft waiting to land. You also, of course, at Heathrow most of the time,

got a queue of aircraft waiting to take off in order to maximise that incredibly constrained space.

I mean, you're right. It is a mathematically deterministic approach you can take in the long run. But if you think about that aircraft in Austin, first of all, I don't know what the constraints are Austin, right? I don't know what the turnaround time is that aircraft. I don't know what the FAA are going to say. So there may also be a curfew in Austin. So they have to take off at a certain time, which means they'll arrive at a certain time.

So there's a whole load of different factors in there that you have to think about. Whether on route, you know, if they take a route that has a jet stream that's a bit faster, yeah, they can easily pick up 10 minutes or 15. So there are an awful lot of variables, not insurmountable. And you would imagine AI and computing of the future will be able to do that. It will require a great deal of

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