NP Aerospace

NP Aerospace turns a century of Coventry moulding know-how into armour. The business began in 1926 as the Bakelite moulding department of Courtaulds, became National Plastics under the same owner in 1959, and entered defence in 1979 with Mk6 helmets for the British Army. In the early 1990s it armoured the Snatch Land Rover, the first fully composite armoured vehicle to go into volume service, and it kept building composite protection through spells under Morgan Crucible and Morgan Advanced Materials. A 2018 buyout led by James Kempston with Canadian backing put it back on its own footing. Turnover passed fifty million pounds in 2025 and a larger Coventry site opened the same year. The work now splits four ways across personal armour, platform survivability, engineered composites and vehicle systems.

Personal armour is the most visible half. NP Aerospace sells hard armour plates under the LASA brand, covering stand-alone and in-conjunction rifle plates, covert options and an ultra-light variant, alongside LASA AC914 and AC915 ballistic helmets, ballistic leg protection, tactical shields including a trolley mounted system, and body armour cut for female wearers. The Silverback range of bomb disposal suits is the flagship. Its 4020 ELITE gives 360 degree coverage without ballistic windows, uses a three-piece telescopic breastplate and an integrated cooling system, and comes off unaided in under twenty seconds, with a CBRN configuration available. The 3020 ELITE and the 2010 de-mining suit sit below it for lower threat work.

Platform survivability applies the same materials science to vehicles. The CAMAC line covers appliqué and add-on armour, semi-structural armour, spall liners and full composite survivability capsules, sold to vehicle primes as well as directly to armies, and the company builds blast attenuating military seating around the same technology. The engineered composites arm sells that capability as work rather than product, running digital design, prototyping, tooling, cutting, kitting, moulding, lamination and machining for customers who need a composite part qualified rather than a catalogue item.

Vehicle systems is where the company acts as a fleet engineer instead of a component maker. Since 2019 it has held the UK Ministry of Defence Protected Mobility Engineering and Technical Support contract as engineering authority for more than 2,000 vehicles, a fleet that takes in Mastiff, Wolfhound, Ridgback, Buffalo, Foxhound, Husky, Jackal and Coyote, and it has run over 140 separate tasks under it. A four-year contract worth seventy one million pounds followed in September 2024 for spares and post design services on the wheeled fleet. In Canada, NP Aerospace Canada is prime contractor for the Department of National Defence land equipment engineering support programme, supplies add-on armour to General Dynamics Land Systems Canada for an international light armoured vehicle order, and builds armoured personnel transport modules for Marshall Canada on the logistics vehicle modernisation programme. The same shops convert civilian vehicles for protected transport.