The Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) is the world's largest military air show and an annual highlight for Marshall. This year, RIAT ran from July 14th through 16th, with Marshall maintaining a full presence over all three days.
On entering the event venue, visitors accessed the Hospitality Pavilion via a walkway decked out with full-size banners, highlighting Marshall’s strengths ranging from the recently announced ARC-Radar modular sensor suite to Lilypad by Futureworx.
Some of our industry-leading capabilities were given pride of place — including Marshall ARC-Radar, which was introduced with a brand new interactive virtual reality demonstration, as well as a detailed scale model.
Over the course of RIAT 2023, the Marshall Aerospace team delivered dozens of VR demonstrations, showcasing our deep engineering capability.
The RIAT Techno Zone, a large pavilion dedicated to hands-on education, is one of the busiest areas of the show every year. This year's Techno Zone was particularly well attended, drawing over 10,000 school children over the weekend.
Marshall's Techno Zone stand is always one of the most popular, and that was even more the case this year. Thanks to a huge amount of support from six extraordinary apprentices and trainees, the team was able to teach crowds of visitors of all ages and knowledge levels about STEM and aviation through a range of fun and informative activities and games.
In keeping with the broader RIAT 2023 theme of SKYTANKER 23, the activities included:
- A quiz on aviation and in-air refuelling history (including a prize draw)
- A dexterity game based on “probe and drogue” refuelling, slightly similar to “pin the tail on the donkey”
- Pop-rivet artwork depicting the refuelling process
Other activities included a range of Marshall STEM staples, such as making bracelet-making using 14 gauge wire and demonstrating static discharge with a van der Graaff generator.
We were also privileged to host Minister of State for Indo-Pacific Anne-Marie Trevelyan (pictured below with Marshall CEO Kathy Jenkins) for a tour of the Techno Zone space and a discussion about the importance of engineering skills for the defence sector.
The timing of this conversation was particularly appropriate given Marshall’s announcement on the first day of RIAT regarding plans to open its second UK-based Skills Academy in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, from September 2024 with an initial intake of 200 young people.