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.

Becoming a civvy. Well, I’ll tell you what.

I left the RAF on £8,500 a year and took a job in West London on £13,500. On paper, that looked like a decent pay rise. Then I started looking for somewhere to live and quickly found out that £13.5k did not go very far at all.

To make matters worse, I got clobbered by emergency tax because, as usual, the RAF could not manage civil paperwork properly. I ended up renting a room in a house on the Britwell estate in Langley. Anyone who knows the area will know it was not exactly the most desirable place to land. Then there was the rail season ticket on top. By that point I was already drowning in debt and had not even bought any food yet.

For three months I was on emergency tax and lived on beans on toast the whole time.

On my first day working for the CAA, I met my boss for the first and only time. He told me I would be working on NAS Monitor with Martin Hutchings. The strange thing was that I had joined to work in Ross’s Flight Data Processing team, because that was the world I actually knew.

NAS Monitor was, and probably still is, the blackest of black arts. It was basically the operating system behind an air traffic control system. Completely the wrong place to put me, really. I was not much of an engineer in the true sense. I was an ATC man who understood operations.

Still, life throws things at you and sometimes you just have to get on with it.

Martin was a complete brain box, the absolute opposite of me in many ways, but I learned a huge amount from him and I learned it fast.

My writing was Martin’s first challenge. It simply was not accurate enough for engineering. He was very good at waving his red pen around, and plenty of what I produced came back covered in corrections. But I learned.

Bit by bit I became far more methodical. Learning how to write accurate tests properly did two things. First, it improved my writing. Second, it forced me to understand the system in real detail. Once you can describe exactly what a system should do, and exactly how it has gone wrong, you are already halfway to understanding it properly.

That, in turn, meant I could write PTRs, Program Trouble Reports, in proper detail. Within a year I had raised more PTRs than anyone else in the department.

The next problem was that working on NAS Monitor meant working on the live system. That, in turn, meant doing much of the work in the early hours of the morning, when there was the least operational risk.

Getting a train in for a 10pm start was bad enough. Getting one home at 3am was worse. In the end, on those nights, I would often just sleep in the office.

It was all slowly killing me, or at least that is what it felt like at the time. I was skint, exhausted, living badly, and working ridiculous hours. But there was an upside. Very quickly, I was becoming one of the very few real NAS experts in the world.

I had the perfect teacher and the hunger to learn.

After three years of doing that, I decided I was starting to get stale. I was no longer really learning anything new, and that is always a dangerous place to be. Once you stop learning, you are just repeating yourself.

At that point there was a new project in town, one that was going to replace the whole lot. That sounded exactly like the place I ought to be, so I volunteered to move across.

In 1994, I joined the new project.

Oh dear. What had I done?