CANSO Airspace World 2025

Far beyond simple ‘remote towers’, in this session the panel will explore two examples of how digital tower technology is transforming airport operations in surprising ways, helping enable growth, enhance safety and improve performance.

You’ll learn how Manchester Airport is revolutionising its operation through a state-of-the-art Digital Apron Management System, creating a hybrid control tower to allow its controllers to manage and optimise the airport ground operation and improve on time performance. You’ll also hear about Searidge’s technology platform that helps airports to integrate new ADS-B surveillance and improve tracking across the whole airfield.

Intelligent Approach is the world’s only Time Base Separation tool, delivering greater capacity, better on time performance and a reduction in carbon emissions at Heathrow, Toronto and Schiphol airports.

In this session you’ll learn about two world first deployments.

Pairwise Separation is a totally new way of calculating the minimum separation between individual arriving pairs of aircraft. Based on the specific characteristics of each aircraft type, this tailored way of managing the flow of arrivals further boosts capacity, reduces holding and cuts fuel burn. Now deployed for Heathrow, you’ll hear about how it was done, and the benefits being delivered so far.

Delivering an arrival spacing tool for a single runway, mixed mode airport is something that’s never been done before. Due for deployment at one of the world’s busiest single runway airports in March 2025, the panel will discuss how Intelligent Approach is able to integrate both arriving and departing traffic to further enhance operational efficiency and boost on time performance.

The debut of the blood sample drone delivery service between two London hospitals, led by the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Apian, and Wing in collaboration with the UK Civil Aviation Authority and NATS, marked a new milestone for advanced beyond visual line of sight drone operations.

With weekday service delivering numerous clinical samples per flight to the St Thomas’ hospital lab, the operations transport blood samples for patients undergoing surgery who are at high risk of complications from bleeding disorders. The service works to improve patient care with faster and more frequent transportation and subsequent analysis of blood samples.

In this session, join regulatory experts from the inner workings of the London Health Bridge initiative for a discussion of the considerations, learnings, and next opportunities for drone operations in complex urban airspace.

Introducing Green Aviation Insights (GAIN), NATS’ industry-first, global benchmarking, reporting and collaboration data platform designed for air navigation service providers (ANSPs).

In this CEO level panel, you will hear why GAIN’s founding members are working together to measure airspace efficiency in a standardised way, aiming to decrease emissions in the airspace they manage.

They will explain why they are placing environmental performance high on their strategic agendas, and how this new, global community will fast-track their journeys to net-zero through analytics and shared insights.

Working together, ANSPs can deliver measurable progress in sustainability.

The aviation industry is at a critical juncture where growth pressures are outpacing the limits of traditional systems. Digital transformation, powered by collaborative data platforms, offers a way forward—ushering in a new era for Air Traffic Control (ATC) and airside operations. This session explores how a platform-centric approach, akin to those transforming healthcare and banking, enables stakeholders across the airport ecosystem (ATC, airside operations, and airlines) to collaborate more effectively, unlocking the full potential of digitisation.

Discover how initiatives like Digital Towers and Digital Airfield Operation Centres are just the beginning, with the real, long-term value residing in shared, data-driven platforms. Learn why quality data, interoperability, and high-performing technology solutions are key to addressing aviation’s stringent standards while keeping pace with rapid growth.

As aviation demand continues to grow, optimising airspace capacity while ensuring efficiency and sustainability requires unprecedented collaboration. This panel brings together senior leaders from airlines, ANSPs, and aircraft manufacturers to explore innovative, joint approaches to airspace management.

Discussions will focus on:

• How enhanced collaboration between ANSPs and airlines can unlock more efficient, flexible airspace usage.
• The critical role of data sharing and operational coordination in overcoming capacity challenges.
• Balancing growth, sustainability, and resilience in a rapidly evolving, complex airspace environment.

This session will share key insights from industry leaders NATS, Amazon and Flylogix, pioneers of commercialisation of drone operations who are delivering a diverse range of services which are underpinned by NATS core operational and technological expertise.

Amazon have been delivering packages for over a decade and are continuing to revolutionise the way the world shops by expanding their operation to incorporate speedy, drone delivery services.

Flylogix are leading the way in operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations for their offshore oil and gas customers in the North Sea, Scotland, making a significant business impact by improving efficiencies, effectiveness and improving safety.

NATS will discuss the critical role of advanced technology, including their next generation master control room, the new role of the airspace manager, modernisation of airspace and regulatory collaboration that is enabling the commercialisation of these drone services.

This session promises to provide valuable insights into the future of drone operations and how its commercial potential is being unlocked.

Aviation services are built with precision and stringent assurance standards to ensure optimal performance and safety. However, as cyber threats become more sophisticated and agile, the aviation industry must evolve its approach to safeguarding safety-critical systems. This panel will explore how aviation stakeholders can build, develop, and maintain robust services that meet high safety standards while remaining resilient to dynamic cyber threats. Discussions will focus on balancing the need for rapid response to vulnerabilities with the long-term stability required in aviation operations.

The UK's leading provider of air traffic control services, NATS is enabling the rapid growth of future flight technologies and uncrewed aircraft. Working closely with regulators, governments, airports and operators, NATS provides airspace management expertise creating safe and efficient solutions to integrate the world of future flight into our skies.

Rapid changes in aviation demand a new way of managing airspace – OpenAir – a UK-wide information infrastructure providing integrated aeronautical and network management to all airspace users, enabling a consistent and assured picture of all planned airspace activity. OpenAir expands on NATS' services to offer a broad range of capabilities to all users, and provide a safe foundation for seamless airspace integration. It will also establish a new and novel business model, avoiding the need for funding from airlines or the public sector.

Join us to discover OpenAir, and how it will revolutionise the way we manage our skies.

The UK Airspace Modernisation Strategy is an ambitious program to modernise, improve and optimise airspace operations. GE Aerospace and project partner NATS, together with Ryanair and Stansted Airport, are working on an exciting R&D concept project to exploit the aircraft extended arrivals process at capacity-constrained airports, through enhanced trajectory prediction.

This feeds into broad industry-wide objectives for reducing emissions, noise and delay. In addition, it maps to objectives defined in the UK PCP (SI 2022/211) and EU CP1 regulations. Join us for this session to hear the project’s findings so far and get a glimpse into how sharing critical real time data might lead to one of the industry’s most transformational efficiency developments.