Air traffic control encourages working from home to reach net zero

Telegraph

6 days ago

The air traffic control company responsible for Britain's skies embraced home working in a drive to 'go green', The Telegraph can disclose.
Many staff at National Air Traffic Services (Nats) have been allowed to work remotely after managers decided it would help the organisation reduce its carbon footprint and cut car journeys to reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2035.
The 'agile working' policy does not include air traffic controllers themselves, as those people all still work inside secure control centres. However, it extends up to board level including chief executive Martin Rolfe, and also allows some operations staff to work from home.
They are allowed to do so despite Nats being criticised for an air traffic control meltdown in 2023, which lasted for four hours in part because an on-call engineer who could have fixed a malfunctioning computer system was working from home and unable to gain full access.
A subsequent failure for around half an hour on Wednesday triggered more than 150 cancellations and disrupted tens of thousands of holidaymakers.
Nats has repeatedly said that agile working is crucial to help its green ambitions.
In a responsible business report from 2021, published as the country recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic, a senior manager described how agile working would help Nats go green.
'The need to reduce our environmental impacts and costs was firmly part of our plans prior to Covid,' he said.
'Now the pandemic has hastened discussions on the amount and type of property and accommodation the business will need in the future, particularly in the context of agile working, which will allow Nats to make better use of people and space.
'A more permanent element of remote working also potentially supports a reduction in car journeys. Creating a new, agile-ready office work environment offers the opportunity to 'go green', and we're encouraging employees to make the most of the 'new office and new start' post-Covid.'
Current job vacancies which allow remote working include a military air traffic control specialist, a post described as playing a 'key role within the operations transformation department' and responsibility for overseeing the implementation of a military radar contract.
Others include a senior project manager in charge of 'multiple complex and major projects' and a tactical training planner whose roles include ensuring that 'competency is maintained'.
In another report in July 2023, shortly before the August bank holiday air traffic chaos of that year, Nats unveiled a five-year plan titled 'our route towards carbon negative'.
As part of its plan to reduce emissions 'on the ground' it said that it would reduce 'consumption and improve energy efficiency, reduce unnecessary business and commuting travel emissions, adopt agile working'.
It boasted of a 6 per cent reduction in its 'commuting footprint' and said that by not returning all of its staff to the office, it had reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
The air traffic control company won a 'climate leaders' award the following year for achieving the highest score in a survey that asked stock market-listed companies how they were reducing emissions.
Solar panels
Part of that work included installing more than 2,600 solar panels on the roof of Nats' Swanwick air traffic control centre, which was completed a year ago.
Bosses hope that the panels will eventually provide up to a fifth of the centre's electricity needs, even though the technology only generates power when the sun is shining.
'This project is the first of three large-scale solar installations at Nats' sites involving some 12,000 panels,' Nats said in a statement about the Swanwick works issued last July.
'Work is underway to fit solar panels to the roof of the Prestwick Centre in Ayrshire and ground-mounted panels will be installed on adjoining land later this year,' it added.
Prestwick is the headquarters of Scottish Control, which is in charge of the skies over the northern UK mainland and Northern Ireland.
It also hosts Shanwick Oceanic Control, which is responsible for all flights to and from the US that pass over the eastern half of the North Atlantic.
However, reliance on solar panels has previously been blamed for blackouts such as those seen in Spain and Portugal earlier this year.
In April the solar-dependent Spanish electricity grid became unstable thanks to the large amount of intermittent renewable power connected to it, eventually triggering a total loss of electricity across the entire Iberian peninsula.
Fears of aviation meltdowns because of unreliable power supplies came true earlier this year when Heathrow Airport was forced to close after a site-wide power cut that disrupted 700,000 airline passengers around the world.
That incident was eventually traced back to the failure of a single National Grid transformer with a fault that had been known about for years.
Diversity hiring
A focus on air traffic diversity hiring was also criticised by Donald Trump earlier this year after a deadly crash between a military helicopter and passenger plane that killed 67 people in Washington DC.
The US president said that employees with 'severe disabilities' had been hired as part of a diversity and inclusion drive and vowed to 'put safety first'.
A Nats spokesman said on Thursday: 'Yesterday's issue was radar related and was resolved quickly by switching to the back-up system during which time we reduced traffic to ensure safety. There is no evidence that this was cyber related.
'Regarding our working policies, we adopted 'agile working' in 2020, post-pandemic for appropriate roles. It does not include frontline staff such as controllers and engineers based in our centres.'