About us
Our business dates back to 1931 - and since then our products have played key roles around the world. Today, we employ 130 employees at our secure facility in Kirkbymoorside, in North Yorkshire, UK, where we are a major local employer. We are proud to have designed and manufactured the first CAA certified, all composite airframe, the Slingsby Firefly. And we have even built a hovercraft that featured in a James Bond film.
Our proven capabilities in design, manufacture and qualification of composite structures, over many platforms and programmes, give us the ability to support a diverse range of customer requirements in an agile and flexible way to suit specific customer needs, whether that be a full design and certification programme, a design for manufacture or build to print manufacture. We can flex our capabilities to suit our customers with a minimum number of complex bespoke structures to medium to high volumes of production products.
In recent years, we’ve continued to invest in our equipment and people 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.
In 2020, we won the North of England Prestige Award for Aerospace to celebrate our successful performance on a number of programmes – a proud moment for the team and the customers we support.
As part of our continuous improvement programme, we also secured a grant funded by Sharing in Growth, which works with UK manufacturers to assist with furthering their ongoing long-term competitiveness on a global stage. Working with SiG coaches and subject matter experts, we’re ensuring best practices and developing our people to be future fit for growth in our traditional aerospace and defence markets and to assist our ability to succeed in adjacent markets.
We have a well-respected apprenticeship scheme that works in conjunction with Derwent Training, an organisation local to our Kirkbymoorside base.
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 support to the service whenever needed, around the clock. Our site is also a designated location to site a fire engine in case the local station is unable to be manned as a result of Covid-19.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we redeployed some of our teams to produce much-needed protective masks using our bespoke tooling equipment - a composite cloth-cutting machine - to ensure our local medical facilities had the essential PPE. We have manufactured and donated over 10,000 face protection visors to the NHS, local hospices, care homes, schools and local businesses.
As Marshall Slingsby Advanced Composites, we are 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 UAE.
Marshall, which owns a broad portfolio of businesses in the Aerospace and Defence, Automotive, Fleet Management, Property and Education sectors, boasts a rich heritage with aviation dating back to 1912 when its mechanics played a key role in the repair of the British Army Airship Beta II.
Since then, the Marshall name has become synonymous with the defence industry, not least because of its long history of apprenticeships that has seen it launch the careers of over 20,000 apprentices, lots of whom remain in the business and many of whom have gone on forge amazing careers elsewhere in the industry.
Despite its long and illustrious past, the Marshall of today is very firmly focused on the future, 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.
