A Recent Visit Report

Hercules(C130) and Tristar meet the NES.

       40th Anniversary C130 of Marshall - Lockheed link up                            Closeup of the Tristar Cockpit
Photos courtesy of the marshall website - (click here to visit)
On Saturday May 9th members visited the aircraft maintenance facility at Marshall at Cambridge. Tucked away behind some nondescript wartime buildings on the outskirts of Cambridge are three enormous hangers and the largest private tarmaced airfield in Europe. This is the home of the Aircraft Divisionof Marshall of Cambridge. Across the road is the Marshall Motor Group, the largest privately owned Motor Group in the Country, with about ten dealerships under one roof, whilst further afield at Mildenhall is their Vehicle Engineering Division.

Marshall is indeed a large and very diverse Company, still run by the same family and likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Perhaps the size and diversity of the Marshall Group is their strength, couple this with their considerable and varied technical expertise in completing major servicing and development work on a variety of aircraft types makes them a major player in our economy. At the moment they seem to be concentrating on conversion programmes for C-130 and military Tristar aircraft but I had the distinct feeling that they could retool to other aircraft types almost overnight.

After coffee and an illustrated introduction to Marshall by John Arnold, a retired senior executive, who was kind enough to give of his time to show us round, we were taken into the cathedral sized servicing hangers. The sheer size of the hangers is extremely difficult to visualise, it would have been good to have had a photograph to give some idea of just how big the hangers are, but for obvious reasons photography is not permitted. Someone said that a light aircraft could take off inside the main hanger it’s that big,they could well be right.

              FTB landing after its first successful flight
         First engine run up for the Marshall FTB

Many members were intrigued by a new prototype engine with an eight bladed propeller currently on test at Marshall. We were not told much about the performance of the engine, but it was curious to note that when stationary the propeller blades were angled forward and were of a much larger diameter than the normal C-130 blades.

For more information about the Marshall Group today visit their website and if you are interested in how Marshall started then 'The Marshall Story' by Sir Arthur Marshall makes fascinating reading. If you can’t get a copy contact Bruce Thompson who won one in the charity raffle held during our visit.

Many Thanks to John Arnold for showing us round and to Terry Holloway for making the visit possible
                                                                                                                                       Mike Vincent       May 2009