Heathrow will be working in collaboration with Westfield Sportscars, and Oxbotica, to develop new automated pods for public trials this summer. Using entirely British engineering and software capabilities, the three companies will develop pods capable of operating fully autonomously and safely on the streets of London, as part of the GATEway driverless car project in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

After nine years and three terms as chairman of Heathrow, Sir Nigel Rudd will be stepping down from his role in September 2016 in line with standard board practice. During his tenure, Heathrow has gone through significant change with Rudd advising the Heathrow Board - including on matters such as the sale of airports and a regrouping of the company to focus solely on Heathrow, the UK’s hub airport.

A report from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee has advised the British government not to allow the building of a third runway at London Heathrow unless strict environmental criteria can be met. In the latest stage of a long-running debate, the Airports Commission published a report backing a third runway in July.

Demand at Heathrow has continued to grow, with traffic up 2.3 per cent to a record 56.9 million passengers. Service quality was also ahead of other European hubs during a record summer, with five separate days where Heathrow welcomed over a quarter of a million passengers per day.

Vietnam Airlines has welcomed the inaugural arrival into Heathrow of its first new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The UK hub becomes the first international destination on Vietnam Airlines’ network to be served by the new aircraft. After touching down at 09:18 this morning, aircraft VN-A861 was officially welcomed by Nguyen Van Thao, Vietnamese ambassador to the UK.

Emirates’ eight daily flights to London will all be served by the highly popular A380s from January 1st 2016, cementing the airline’s status as the largest international A380 operator into the British capital. Combined with the airline’s double daily A380 services to Manchester, Emirates will offer 70 A380 flights per week into the UK, more than any other country on the Emirates network.