About us

About us

Our Company

Dating back to 1931, we are proud to be one of the UK’s premier providers of complex composite structures. As experts in designing, manufacturing, and certifying advanced composites, we operate across multiple defence platforms and our products have a global impact.

Marshall Slingsby Advanced Composites is part of the privately owned Marshall Group, headquartered in Cambridge, employing a global team of over 2,000 highly skilled people at locations in the UK, Northern Europe, North America, and the UAE. Marshall Group owns a broad portfolio of businesses in the aerospace, land defence, fleet management, property and education sectors, boasting a rich aviation heritage dating back to 1912.



Our Services

We pride ourselves on our ability to support a diverse range of customer requirements to suit specific customer needs, ranging from full design and certification to design for manufacture or build-to-print manufacture. We can flex our capabilities to suit our customers, offering everything from prototyping and one-off runs to mid- and high-volume of production.

Our People and Facilities

Employing over 130 engineers and support staff, we are a major local employer based in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire. Our people and facilities give us the flexibility to deliver tailored composite solutions with expert knowledge and specialist tooling and equipment.

In recent years, we’ve continued to invest in our people and facilities including additional manufacturing capabilities, design software, inspection and mechanical test capabilities and non-destructive testing. In parallel, we have an ongoing R&D programme developing new capabilities to prepare ourselves for future requirements.

As part of our continuous improvement approach, we secured a grant funded by Sharing in Growth (SiG), which works with UK manufacturers to bolster their ongoing long-term competitiveness on the global stage. Working with SiG coaches and subject matter experts, we have embedded best practices and development of our people to be future fit for growth in aerospace and defence, while assuring our ability to venture into adjacent markets.

We work with Derwent Training, a local training provider specialising in engineering, to be able to bring apprentices into the business and build a pipeline of extraordinary future talent.

Our History

We are proud of our rich history as early pioneers in the use of composites – ranging from the design and manufacture of the Slingsby Firefly (the first CAA-certified all-composite airframe) to the production of a hovercraft featuring in a James Bond film.

During the Covid-19 pandemic we redeployed some of our teams to produce protective masks using our bespoke composite cloth-cutting equipment, helping to ensure our local medical facilities had essential PPE. We manufactured and donated over 10,000 face protection visors to the NHS, local hospices, care homes, schools and local businesses.

Building on our heritage of innovation, our business today is very firmly focused on the future. We are finding and developing the next generation of talent, investing in record levels of R&D spend and harnessing emerging technologies to solve its customers’ problems, support local communities and protect our planet.

We’re proud supporters of the local fire service and have a number of retained firefighters among our employees who attend local emergencies and provide invaluable around-the-clock support to the service whenever needed.


Visit our online history experience