Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The Dutch design office will provide technical support to customers across the aerospace business, as well as to the Royal Netherlands Air Force with whom Marshall is working to upgrade and modernise its fleet of C-130 Hercules. MA currently has eight people recruited for the Dutch facility – primarily in structural design.

One of the staff is an avionics engineer, who is working at Cambridge on a Dutch Airforce upgrade contract, so he will deploy back to the Netherlands to provide in-country support when the aircraft are returned to service.

Marshall has the capacity in the current office to accommodate up to 22 people and aims to grow the numbers to approximately 20 by the end of 2007. It already has around 270 designers working at Cambridge across different projects and has further design capability in Australia and Canada.

Marshall Aerospace has responded swiftly to market demand and is seeing an encouraging level of its design capability translate to physical projects in its hangars.

The signing of the HIOS (Hecules Integrated Opera-tional Support) contract with the RAF, along with the procurement by the Dutch Air Force of two further C130 aircraft, and their major upgrade programme to glass cockpit standard, means there is a substantial level of effort being expended in the design of modifications and repairs.

MA’s primary field of work is in the defence sector of transport fleets such as the Hercules C130, the TriStar, and the A400M. But it has an expanding capability in the design, manufacture, and installation of long range fuel tanks to both military and civil aircraft.

Marshall is being coy about set-up costs for the Dutch venture but says it plans to extend the skills capability, and hence the scope of work being carried out, and this will require fairly substantial investment in the near future.

Neither the Cambridge nor the Dutch design teams are being restricted by geographical boundaries. The team in Holland is working on any project that requires structural design capability. This includes tasks across the C130, TriStar and A400M spectrum, not just work supporting the RNLAF C130 fleet.

MA chief executive Martin Broadhurst said: “We’re very excited about this new venture in The Netherlands and look forward to working with the government, Armed forces, academia, industry and the community to see Marshall Aerospace Netherlands BV succeed as a vibrant and growing national company.”

Past notable achievements from MS include the Concorde nose, in-flight refuelling, several state-of-the-art freight and tanker conversions, satellite launch vehicles, and a variety of avionics and general purpose systems conversions.