Case Study: NATS achieves rapid, large-scale flight-data analysis and CO2 reductions with SQL Server on Microsoft Azure

Analytics at NATS takes flight with the cloud

NATS, the UK’s leading air traffic control provider that manages 2.2 million flights a year and employs about 4,500 people, was facing an analytics bottleneck: massive, high‑resolution data from radar, flight plans and weather (more than 15 TB over four years) made it slow and laborious to get timely, actionable insight—analysts spent roughly 80% of their time on data preparation and an on‑premises build of a four‑year warehouse would have required a full year of continuous processing.

To solve this, NATS moved its data warehouse to SQL Server on Microsoft Azure (running across 250 Azure virtual machines) and ran parallel ETL and analytics to process four years of data in under a month. The cloud solution enabled detailed fuel‑burn and CO2 modelling, faster self‑service BI (analysis that took weeks now takes minutes), a 4.3% reduction in ATM‑related CO2 (an enabled reduction of over 1 million tonnes), and opened the door to predictive analytics for continued operational and environmental improvements.

NATS

Ray Lim

Business Intelligence Manager