History of air traffic control in the United Kingdom

On 15 July 1919, the world's first commercial flight occurred, when Henry Shaw (1892-1977) piloted a de Havilland DH.9 for Aircraft Transport and Travel from Hendon to Le Bourget airfield in Paris.[1] The pilot did not have a passport.

Jimmy Jeffs was the world's first air traffic controller at London Airport on 22 February 1922. The Mayday callsign originated at London Airport in 1921.

From 1928, radio signals from Croydon, Pulham St Mary in Norfolk and Lymm in Kent triangulated the position of aircraft; a similar system was set up by Germany in 1940, known as the Battle of the Beams.

On the evening of 25 February 1935 at Stowe Nine Churches (Upper Stowe) in Northamptonshire, the so-called Daventry experiment took place with Robert Watson-Watt to prove that radar detection of aircraft was possible.

Ground-controlled interception (GCI) was first developed in the UK during the early part of WWII, at RAF Sopley in Hampshire, close to Bournemouth. Development of the system began in October 1940, and the first ground-controlled interception took place on 1 January 1941 with the Bristol Beaufighter at RAF Middle Wallop, and the call sign Starlight.[2] From late 1941, GCI would be carried out by the AMES Type 7 radar, which provided a 360 degrees view; such radar was developed at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE).

On Wednesday 18 June 1958, a £5m plan for coordinating air traffic control was announced. Four new radar centres would be built; previous to this, ATC personnel received aircraft positional information over the radio from pilots, not from any radar. The UK Air Traffic Service began in September 1959; it controlled air movements above 25,000 ft.

The USA had created its Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also in 1958.

On Monday 10 December 1962, Julian Amery, the Minister for Aviation, announced the new National Air Traffic Control Services, with a central controller. Military air traffic control was controlled by the Military Air Traffic Organisation.

The London Terminal Control Centre at RAF West Drayton opened in November 1966, but only received radar coverage in 1971; previous to that, Southern Radar had been headquartered at RAF Sopley in Hampshire from 1959. NATCS, the coordinating organisation, became NATS in April 1972, when it became part of the CAA. Computer flight plans were implemented in 1975.

The Mediator system started on 1 February 1971 at West Drayton, with the full computer system beginning in the mid-1970s, planned for March 1972. Manchester Airport became the site of the northern radar centre in 1975.[6]

At London in 1990, a £22m IBM 4381 computer (IBM 370 architecture) replaced an ageing IBM 9020, which was three IBM 360/65 computers. The Princess Royal opened the new computer on 18 June 1990. London looked after the sectors of Daventry, Pole Hill - Northern England, Bristol - Strumble Head, Irish Sea, Cardiff, Dover - Lydd, Clacton, North Sea and Hurn - Seaford - Worthing.[7]

The London Area Control Centre at West Drayton moved to Swanwick, Hampshire at 2.30am on Sunday 27 Jan 2002, when 29-year-old controller Sarah Harris guided an Airtours International Flight AIH 550 from Gran Canaria Airport at Las Palmas safely into Birmingham Airport. Swanwick had been hoped to open in 1996 and to cost £350m. Swanwick oversaw flights above 20,000 feet, excluding those around Manchester under 21,000 feet and around South East England under 24,500 feet.[8]

Swanwick was intended to replace two sites at West Drayton and Manchester (at Manchester Airport), but the West Drayton centre remained open to oversee London and South East England, and was planned to close in 2007; it closed on 23 November 2007 when around 500 staff moved to Swanwick. NATS also have a technical centre in Whiteley. The RAF 78 Sqn moved to Swanwick from January 2008.[9] Swanwick receives radar information from nine radar sites.

There were 372,000 aircraft movements in the UK in 1960, 480,000 in 1962, and 610,000 by 1969.[10]

In 2017, NATS handled around 2.5 million flights.

The UK has the third-largest aviation network after the US and China. Up to 80% of North Atlantic air traffic passes through UK airspace. The Shanwick OCA (Shanwick Oceanic Control) was formed in 1966, and controlled from Prestwick, with two communication towers in southern Ireland and Gloucestershire.

The Concorde route from Heathrow Airport to Bahrain was the world's first supersonic air transport route.

Early VHF communications with aircraft began around 1950. From Monday 8 May 1950 ATC staff at RAF Prestwick could speak to pilots on 122.1 MHz.

Marconi Radar Systems, who built much of the radar, had sites at Bill Quay in Gateshead (mechanical infrastructure), in the north of Leicester (at the junction of Blackbird Road and Anstey Lane), and two large sites in Chelmsford, although much of these radars were for air defence.

The radome canopies were made by English Electric Reinforced Plastic Division at Warton, which became GEC Reinforced Plastics, moving to GEC Engineering at Clayton-le-Moors, north of Accrington, in 1992, later becoming Techbuild Composites in 1994; off the A6185 at junction 7 of the M65.

27 Doppler VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) beacons, costing £3.5m, were built in 1982 by Racial Avionics (former Decca Radar) of New Malden.

In June 2016 Raytheon received a contract to supply the Mode S monopulse secondary radar to all of NATS 23 radar sites. A Radar Reference Facility was built by Raytheon in Hampshire, to train staff.

Civilian

Allans Hill in Aberdeenshire in January 2007

Cromer radar station in October 2018; it has a Raytheon ASR 10SS

• Allans Hill, Aberdeenshire
• Blackpool, has a Raytheon ASR 10SS; it was fitted with 500 kW 50 cm Marconi Type 264A, when operating the Mediator system
• Claxby, also known as Lincoln, in north-east Lincolnshire, has a 250-mile range, on land owned by BT
• In August 1970, a new £150,000 Plessey DASR-1 radar for Titterstone Clee Hill, in Shropshire, was built;[11] Clee Hill had RAF radar during World War II, but this site had closed in 1956
• Cromer Radar was set up in the late 1980s, with a link to a new air traffic control centre at Stansted; it had Plessey Watchman as its primary radar for the North Sea, often for helicopters travelling to North Sea oil platforms. The RAF and RN also had Cromer as their primary radar; it worked via a travelling-wave tube.[12]
• Debden, Uttlesford, in Essex, the 23cm radar has a 160-mile range
• Heathrow, the 23cm radar opened in November 1985 with a 250-mile range, and a 37-metre-high concrete tower, that was built by Fairclough Civil Engineering of Adlington in Lancashire; this has been replaced by a site at Bovingdon, of Dacorum in Hertfordshire around 2012
• Lowther Hill, at 2,377 ft high near Wanlockhead, on the boundary of Lanarkshire and Dumfriesshire, it was the centre of the Scottish GEE network, which began on 19 August 1948, with slave stations at Craigowl Hill, 1493 feet high, at Tealing, north of Dundee,[13][14] and Ru Stafnish on Kintyre, 709 feet high, in Argyll and Bute, on the west coast of Scotland.[15][16] From May 1950 it had a radio en-route transmitter (today known as a non-directional beacon or NDB) for contact with pilots in Scotland, [17]in the VHF range from 110 to 130 MHz[18]
• Pease Pottage, in the north-east of West Sussex, a 23cm radar opened in December 1986, on land owned by the Met Office, with a 160-mile range
• Perwinnes Hill, near Aberdeen, for Aberdeen Airport at Dyce, and the helicopters for the North Sea; it had a Marconi 264 radar installed on 7 October 1976[19][20]
• Tiree, at Ben Hynish on the Inner Hebrides, it has a 210-nautical mile range; the £8m radar replaced a military radar in 3cm radar Northern Ireland, and opened in July 1986; a new television transmitter was required to be built as well; the structural engineer was Sir Frederick Snow[21][22][23]

On Thursday 9 June 1960, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, West Germany and Holland decided to coordinate air traffic control as jet aircraft were much quicker, to prevent collisions.[24]

Eurocontrol in November 2005

On Friday 20 December 1968, an agreement was signed to build Europe's first international control centre at Maastricht, to open in 1972, called the Maastricht Automatic Data Processing system or MADAP, which is now called the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre; for the site, Plessey would build two computers, the controllers' consoles and a radar distribution unit. In 1981, the first computer data link between LATCC at West Drayton and Eurocontrol was established, followed by Brest Airport and Reims in 1986 and Paris in 1987; advanced boundary information (ABI) began in late 1990.[25]

Eurocontrol, established on 1 March 1964, had been initially set up for eventually becoming a Europe-wide full air traffic control system, but individual countries could not together form agreements for this to fully happen; this meant that by the late 1980s Eurocontrol oversaw only flights above 25,000 feet over the Netherlands, Belgium and part of West Germany.[26]

Much of European air traffic control is run on the CIMACT software package. The Single European Sky was created in the late 1990s, being official from 2001.

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