As Managing Director, NERL, Ian is currently in charge of 3,200 staff and responsible for the regulated en route business covering all engineering and operations, including the centres at Swanwick and Prestwick. Previously, Ian held the post of Chief Operating Officer, NERL. An experienced General Manager and Projects Director, Ian has spent over 20 years in operations and project management servicing the power, water and transportation industries. He trained as a Control and Instrumentation Engineer in the power sector and joined Alstom Transport in 1997 as a Project Manager becoming Operations Director in charge of businesses in Europe, Africa and South America. Ian developed project management methodology for the transportation sector and is widely acknowledged as an expert in project management development and deployment.


Could you describe briefly the status the European scenario with regard to ATM?
To date most of the technology and operational developments have been completed generally by each ANSP individually creating many different solutions to effectively solving the same ATM issues, this is now evolving and over the next 10 years will see a major change to operational concepts with the deployment of the SESAR programme, the success of this will only come about by a coordinated effort across all ANSP's, industry and stakeholders and therefore Europe is facing one of its most interesting but challenging periods in the field of ATM.
 
How do you see the evolution of the role of the European ANSPs in Europe?
Today in Europe ANSP's co-operate in a number of alliances and agreements. Two of the major alliances are ANSP's participating into functional air space blocks (FABS) and the co-operation we have through the SESAR programme. I see these two parallel activities as vital to ensure that collectively the ANSP's create a more efficient network in Europe whilst reducing the environmental impact, improving safety, lowering costs and improving capacity.
 
What is the NATS strategy in this context?
NATS sees the co-operation within the A6 (Aena, DFS, DSNA, ENAV, Noracon, NATS) and its work with its FAB partners as the most important part of its European partnering strategy. In this context creating common methods of operation and interoperable systems is at the heart of NATS vision. I am very excited with the progress we are making in the A6 where NATS and ENAV have been working very very closely together to form a much closer working relationship between the A6 partners. In Paris on the 22nd June 2011 all the A6 DG's and CEO's signed a memorandum of co-operation which was a big milestone in progressing this relationship.
 
An efficient, synchronized and timely deployment of SESAR is a key factor for successfully modernizing the European ATM Infrastructure and thus render Europe more competitive. What is still needed in Europe to organize the process efficiently?
First and foremost we as a group of A6 ANSP's must request our controllers and operational experts to engage with each other to start the journey towards common operations. In parallel to this alignment of all of our technology roadmaps, 4-flights, Coopans and iTEC is a fundamental part of the early stages of the deployment process. I could imagine that we could have expert teams from different ANSP's working together to deploy the SESAR technology in each of our operations.