Meet the Team
A multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and domain experts working at the intersection of AI and air traffic management — spanning NATS, The Alan Turing Institute, and the University of Exeter.
Research Theme 1 — Digital Twin
Research Theme 3 — Assurance
Data Team
Previous Collaborators
Team Profile
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Team
Principal Investigators
Role
Industrial Principal Investigator / Principal Research Engineer
Dr. Richard Cannon
Industrial Principal Investigator / Principal Research Engineer
Biography
Richard Cannon is an Aerospace Engineer and an R&D lead at NATS, the UK's main air navigation service provider. Richard is passionate about aviation and improving the efficiency of our aviation system. Through the Bluebird Programme NATS and the Turing Institute are exploring the challenges of automating air traffic control to build a safe and sustainable future for the industry and to inspire future generations of engineers and scientists.
Publications
- Human-in-the-Loop Testing of AI Agents for Air Traffic Control with a Regulated Assessment Framework
AIAA SciTech Forum, 2026
- A Probabilistic Digital Twin of UK En Route Airspace for Training and Evaluating AI Agents for Air Traffic Control
AIAA SciTech Forum, 2026
- Public trust and blame attribution in human-AI interactions: a comparison between air traffic control and vehicle driving
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2025
- A probabilistic model for aircraft in climb using monotonic functional gaussian process emulators
Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2023





















