Marshall Aerospace

Does anyone have any info on the current Marshalls situation regarding them moving to a new base? Timescales? Feasibility? Likelyhood of it happening?

I have heard a few airfields mentioned, these are;
Mildenhall
Wyton
Waterbeach (I find hard to believe this one though)
Cambridge (Staying put for now?)

Doncaster (Finningley) is a Marshall aerospace base

The plans for Duxford were quite exciting - runway extension, huge hangars and lots more concrete, but that idea was trashed two or three years ago. It all boils down to the City Council's plan to put all new housing ordered by Two Jags Prezza (some 16,000 houses) on one location, the site of the current airport. This year sees the centenary of Marshalls, and I don't doubt they will be at the airport for many more years to come. The current financial crisis will mean that no-one will have the money needed to develop the site, nor will they have the money that Marshall's will demand to be moved somewhere else. In my view, no-one need get too excited about Cambridge Airport closing in the near future.

Thanks WJT, that is what I thought!

I didn't know about the Duxford option though, that could have been really interesting!

What other airfields do they have bases at apart from Finningley?

Cheers

A similar thread is running on Key regarding the same subject. Wyton and Alconbury seem to be current favourites from an airfield point of view. But the distance for the workforce to travel along the nightmare of the A14 corridor at peak times is apparently offputting.

There is also unsupported talk of the USAF leaving Mildenhall in the future, opening up that location for consideration. Was Mildenhalls runways recently resurfaced? Wytons Runways seem in doubt for operations of aircraft as heavy as the C-17 and the Herky birds, both of which will be needing future servicing requirements.
Interesting to say the least.

Wytons runway is easily capable of taking C-17's in terms of weight and they wouldn't be landing fully loaded anyway.

I'm not sure that the C-17s will need on-shore maintenance for some years yet. I seem to recall that the first aircraft were taken under lease and I seem to remember reading in RAF News or somewhere that the first one has recently returned to the US for servicing. I seem to recall also that there is some plan to buy-out the aircraft from their lease, but I'm not sure of the progress with that. Remember that MOD now competes its aircraft maintenance contracts, to the extent that Marshalls did lose the Tristar contract for several years to GAMCO in Abu Dhabi.