Liverpool Airport's air traffic control closes only for a half day on Christmas day.
The rest of the year, a team of 30 controllers work rotating shifts to prevent mid-air collisions and ensure a smooth flow of traffic through Liverpool's airspace. Nigel Brabham, 58, has seen "close calls" and engines knocked out by bird strikes since he started here in 1993 when air traffic control was housed in a brown building on the terminal side of the runway in Speke.
Back then, before the airport was named after John Lennon, traffic was monitored on iconic green screens with a rotating line. Now, controllers communicate with pilots using touchscreens rather than phones, and screens show a filtered radar image of flights dotted across the skies above Merseyside, with red circles indicating sites like the nuclear plant at Capenhurst in Cheshire.
