The next chapter in my career came with the New En-Route Centre, better known as NERC.

On paper, it sounded like the opportunity. Big programme. National importance. Cutting-edge systems. In reality, it was already two years late before we even arrived.

Three of us were sent down into the depths of Hampshire to help move things along. Myself, Steve Loble, and Dave “Ratty” Roden. The plan was simple enough: embed with IBM and add some much-needed momentum.

There was just one small problem.

IBM didn’t really want us there.

IBM North Harbour was enormous in those days. Thousands of people, all busy, all with their own priorities. And then there were three outsiders dropped into the middle of it, with no clear role and no real welcome.

It made for an odd routine.

We’d turn up in the morning, grab a coffee, flick through a few manuals, and then quietly disappear. By midday, we’d usually be in a different Hampshire pub, conducting what became an unofficial but very thorough review process.

Beer, food, and atmosphere. All scored out of ten.

We took it seriously.

By about three in the afternoon, we’d wander back into the office just long enough to be seen, then head home. For me, that meant the drive back up to London.

And then repeat.

Day after day.

We did that for nine months.

Looking back, it sounds ridiculous. At the time, it was worse. There’s only so long you can be paid to exist before it starts to grind you down. You want to contribute. You want to be useful. Sitting on the sidelines does something to your confidence if you let it.

Eventually, things shifted.

Dave headed back to London. I can’t recall exactly what Steve moved on to, but for me, the break came when I was made Performance Work Package Manager.

That changed everything.

The performance team were the first systems group to move into the brand-new NERC building. Purpose-built, modern, and full of promise. Suddenly I was in the middle of it, working alongside IBM and Loral engineers, trying to get a grip on how the system would actually behave under load.

There was just one catch.

Most of the kit wasn’t there yet.

The building was ready. The people were there. But the equipment was still being installed. So instead of testing real systems, we spent our time building theoretical models, trying to predict performance before we had anything solid to measure.

It felt like progress, but only just.

The strange thing about that period is that some of the best laughs of my working life came during one of the most difficult projects I ever worked on. I can’t remember every name in the team now, but there were about five of us in that office, and we laughed a lot.

Proper laughter.

The sort that gets you through long days, impossible problems, and the creeping suspicion that the whole thing might never actually work.

But it was serious work too.

After about a year, we finally had the systems in place. That should have felt like a major step forward. In one sense, it was. The equipment existed. The software was there. The pieces were beginning to look like a real operational system.

There was just one problem.

The performance was nowhere near good enough.

Not a bit short.

Miles off.

So began another long period of head scratching, investigation, tuning, argument, testing, and retesting. Another year slipped by. By then, the project was four years late.

Eventually, most of the big system issues were resolved, but that only took us to the next problem. Having a system is one thing. Being able to support it safely, reliably, and professionally in live operation is something else entirely.

Steve was asked to lead the work on the support infrastructure, and he picked me to help him.

That became a huge piece of work. We had to design the support processes, test them, prove they worked, and make sure we had a properly trained team ready to use them. It was not glamorous work, but it mattered.

In air traffic control, clever engineering is not enough.

You need discipline, process, evidence, and people who know exactly what to do when something goes wrong.

Then we had to prove all of that to NATS.

By this stage, Steve was burnt out. He had carried a lot for a long time, and eventually I was tasked with leading the support organisation.

And then, finally, six years late, NERC went live.

For all the pain, delay, frustration, and sheer bloody effort, we did it.

In my view, and I know many others felt the same, NERC became the best, most resilient, and best-supported air traffic control system in the world.

I learnt more on that project than I was ever likely to learn again. Systems, performance, support, resilience, people, pressure, politics, failure, recovery, and persistence. It was all there.

Looking back, it was a privilege.

A difficult, exhausting, maddening privilege.

But a privilege all the same.

We had helped birth that baby, and against the odds, it flew.