Paul Harwood Blanchard, author of 'Elementary Gliding'[1] and one of the early CFI's of the Cambridge University Gliding Club (not to be confused with Paul Blanshard).
Paul Blanchard (b.24th Dec 1923, Cleveland, Ohio, USA d. June 22nd 2011, Chinnor, Oxon, UK) was Chief Flying Instructor of CUGC 1947-49 and will be remembered particularly for the authorship of Elementary Gliding – A Pupil’s Manual. Paul graduated in Natural Sciences from St John’s College in 1948, becoming CFI in his third undergraduate year.
He had written the first version of Elementary Gliding and offered it to the BGA and the Surrey Gliding Club, but they were not interested in marketing it. So he asked CUGC to produce and distribute it. The result was a duplicated ‘Second Edition’ dated February 1952 ‘compiled by P.H.Blanchard’ with technical drawings by Roger Austin and cartoons by Pete Sullivan, both CUGC members. It incorporated improvements made by other Club members as well, particularly Ken Machin (later CFI). The next edition no longer carried Paul’s name (with his agreement) but just that of the publisher ‘Cambridge University Gliding Club’.
In 1955 a printed version of this appeared, published by Thermal Equipment Ltd, a small company founded by glider pilots, and since 1958 subsequent editions have been published by the BGA, all again under the original author’s name. The fact that it was the CUGC ‘Pupil’s Manual’ rather disappeared. Philip Wills wrote an introduction referring to Paul as having been ‘Chief Instructor of the Surrey Gliding Club’, and later editions even stopped mentioning in the acknowledgments that Austin and Sullivan were CUGC. But Bluebell (CUGC's T21) remained immortalised in the frontispiece, complete with the former cement works chimney near Marshall’s belching the smoke that that generation so often thermalled in. The CUGC archive contains Ken Machin’s copy of the first printed edition autographed by the author ‘With best wishes from Paul’.
Apart from the illustrations, the major CUGC input to Elementary Gliding was the idea of a square circuit as opposed to the prevailing practice of loitering downwind doing S-turns towards the airfield until arriving in position for the final approach and round-out.
CUGC had developed square-circuit training in response to the introduction of dual ab initio instruction in Bluebell (1950) and improved airbrakes. It proved a lasting contribution.