With more than 50 years of working with Lockheed Martin, Cambridge based Marshall Aerospace has become a centre of excellence for the maintenance and upgrade of the C-130 Hercules aircraft, the world’s most successful airlifter.  

The company’s six hangars at Cambridge airport are often full of C-130s from European nations and beyond, undergoing work which ranges from routine maintenance to extensive modification.

The programme is a cornerstone of Marshall’s success with more that 80 per cent of its 1,500 strong workforce engaged on C-130 activity, undertaking design, manufacture and sustainment work at a site where Marshall has been located since 1909.

Marshall was the first authorised Lockheed Martin C-130 service centre in the world and remains the only European centre for servicing the latest ‘J ‘ variant.

This capability enables the company to carry out low level routine maintenance, install a full avionics upgrade or almost totally rebuild an aircraft, if required. Parts are either sourced from two specialist outlets in the US or manufactured by Marshall’s employees in the UK.

This work has been augmented by the establishment of a C-130 test facility at Cambridge, where airframes and wings are tested under extreme pressure to assist with valuable research into fatigue.