As a child sitting in a classroom in Belgium, Nathalie Kühn’s attention kept drifting to the window. Not out of boredom, but out of a question she could not let go: how does it all work? The plane climbing out of sight in the distance was not simply a machine to her. It was the visible tip of an invisible system, thousands of decisions, communications, handoffs, and human judgements converging in real time to move people safely across the world. That curiosity, instinctive and inexhaustible, has carried her from a Michelin-rated restaurant kitchen in Belgium to an FAA examination room in the United States, through Heathrow’s operations centre, across airlines, airports, cargo, and air traffic management, and finally to the EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub in Paris, where she is now helping to design the aviation system of the future.
BORN INTO AVIATION, DRAWN BY COMPLEXITY
Nathalie’s relationship with aviation is, in the most literal sense, inherited. Her mother was among the first women to train as an Air Traffic Controller at MUAC in Maastricht. Her father was a pioneer of IT and programming in European aviation in the mid-1960s. The industry was not simply a professional choice she stumbled upon. It was the water in which she grew up. What drew her in was not the glamour of flight but the logic of the system surrounding it: how every step could be coordinated so smoothly, how so many people in so many roles could act in concert toward a shared outcome.
At fifteen, a one-week flight class offered by her mother gave that fascination a physical dimension. She finally understood how aircraft flew, how a flight was prepared, and how the dynamic exchanges between people in the air and on the ground created what she would later come to recognise as safety. By eighteen, a medical condition had made commercial flying impossible, but the disappointment clarified something important: it was never the cockpit that truly captivated her. It was the architecture of the system around it. She has been building her understanding of that architecture, from every angle available, ever since.
THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM: EARNING AN FAA LICENSE AND AN MBA
After completing her bachelor’s degree, Nathalie made a decision that reflected the audacity that would become characteristic of her entire career: she travelled to the United States to sit the FAA Aircraft Flight Dispatch license program. The course was gruelling, six weeks of intensive study that began with fifty-five candidates. Seven passed. She was the only woman among them. When her examiner shook her hand and offered her the last donut from his bag, he also suggested she consider Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s MBA program. A year later, she was enrolled.
The American academic environment suited Nathalie in ways that the French-speaking university system she had come from had not. She had always struggled to engage with learning by rote, always needed to understand deeply rather than memorise, always been pulled toward questions beyond the official curriculum. At ERAU, that restlessness was not a problem. It was an asset. She became a swim teacher, led associations, worked alongside her studies, and explored the operational and collaborative dimensions of aviation with the support of a mentor she remains in contact with today. It was there that she began to understand that her greatest professional strength was her ability to see the system as a whole.
BUILDING A MAP OF THE WHOLE SYSTEM: A DELIBERATE CAREER
Nathalie’s career has been shaped by a conscious strategy: to work in as many different parts of the aviation ecosystem as possible, so that she could understand not just how each component functions but how changes in one place ripple through all the others. Airlines, airports, ground handling, air cargo, and now research at EUROCONTROL: each role added a layer of operational understanding that the previous ones could not provide. When she joined the operations team at Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, her director’s practice of sending support staff directly into the terminals during disruptions resonated immediately. She joined the Crisis Cell and found in its structured, efficient approach to disruption management a real-world laboratory for studying collaboration under pressure.
The result of this deliberately constructed career map is that Nathalie can now enter a conversation about aviation policy, operational design, or technological integration and see, with unusual clarity, what everyone else in the room can only see partially. That systemic perspective is not an abstract virtue. In her current work, it is the practical foundation for everything she does.
URBAN AIR MOBILITY AND THE FUTURE OF EUROPEAN SKIES
At the EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub in Paris, Nathalie is doing some of the most consequential work of her career. Her primary focus is Urban Air Mobility: the emerging concept of using small, automated aircraft to transport passengers and goods within congested urban and suburban areas. Specifically, she is working on vertiports, the nodes analogous to airports that will serve drones and Vertical Take-Off and Landing Capable Aircraft, and on the question of how these entirely new forms of aviation infrastructure can be safely and efficiently incorporated into the existing Air Traffic Management framework.
The regulatory and standardisation dimensions of this work are her particular domain. Are the current frameworks ready to accommodate drones and vertiports? What is missing? What needs to be amended, and how? These are not theoretical questions. They have direct consequences for whether Urban Air Mobility can develop safely and at meaningful scale, or whether it stalls at the prototype stage for want of the legal and operational architecture it needs to function. Alongside this, Nathalie is leading efforts to incorporate vertiports and Urban Air Mobility into the Airport Collaborative Decision-Making framework, a system she describes as one of her professional passions, and to which she will begin delivering international webinars from September of this year.
RESILIENCE, COLLABORATION, AND THE SYSTEM EQUILIBRIUM
Ask Nathalie what the most significant forces shaping aviation over the next decade will be, and her answer is immediate: resilience, and the collaboration required to achieve it. The aviation system faces simultaneous pressures from geopolitical disruption, climate-related weather volatility, aircraft and staffing shortages, and congestion in both airspace and infrastructure, and these pressures interact rather than operate independently. Addressing any one of them in isolation, she argues, risks worsening the others.
Her prescription is a shift from silo-based thinking to genuine system-wide optimisation. The aviation industry has made real progress in collaborative decision-making, and frameworks like A-CDM demonstrate what transparent data-sharing among stakeholders can achieve. But the industry has not yet found the legal, commercial, and cultural common ground required to extend that collaboration fully. The data exchanges that would allow the system to be optimised as a whole, rather than each of its parts separately, remain constrained by competitive concerns, trust deficits, and regulatory gaps. Nathalie’s work sits precisely at that frontier, designing the frameworks that could finally close it.
LEADING ACROSS CULTURES: KINDNESS AS A STRATEGIC PRINCIPLE
Nathalie has faced the particular kind of friction that women in technical, male-dominated industries know well. Comments about her gender, undervaluation at the start of her career, criticism framed as concerns about emotional leadership, dismissal during pregnancy: she has experienced them all and speaks about them without self-pity, because they have been as formative as the encouragements. What the difficult experiences gave her was clarity: about the values she would not compromise, the limits she would maintain, and the kind of working environment she would fight to create for others.
Her leadership philosophy is built on active listening, openness, respect, kindness, and adaptability. In practice, it means paying close attention to who is speaking in a room and, equally, to who is not. The quiet person in the corner of a meeting may have exactly the insight the group needs. Making space for that voice is not a soft concern. In safety-critical environments, it is the difference between a problem identified early and one discovered too late. She also draws on intuition alongside data, trusting the sense that something is not quite right even when the paper case looks solid, because in her experience that feeling most often signals a human dimension that the analysis has not yet surfaced.
A MOMENT AT THE DUBAI AIRSHOW: FINDING HER ELEMENT
In 2023, nearly eight months pregnant with her second child, Nathalie travelled to the Dubai Airshow to moderate a panel. She did so without the support of her manager at the time, who questioned why she, an Airport Operations Manager, would need to be there. The experience became one of the most significant of her career. Surrounded by aviation professionals from across the globe, exchanging ideas across cultures and disciplines, she felt something click into place. The breadth of perspective in the room, the energy of genuine international collaboration, the sense of being entirely and freely herself: this, she understood, was her element.
That moment of clarity has informed how she thinks about the advice she gives to young professionals entering the industry. Trust yourself. No dream is too big. The people who have made the most significant contributions to any field usually did so with little support and considerable scepticism from those around them. If your ambitions do not make people uncomfortable, she suggests, they are probably not ambitious enough. And alongside the boldness: remain humble, listen without judgement, and take the time to understand the system you are trying to change. Those qualities, combined, are the foundation of the kind of leadership that the aviation industry needs most.
