RAFGSA History

FROM GLIDERS TO LIGHTNINGS - A presentation given by Group Captain Hans Neubroch at the 2003 Annual General Meeting of the RAFGSA

Air Marshals, ladies and gentlemen,
About the time your Chairman kindly invited me, there was a headline in The Daily Telegraph (23 Jan 03), and it read 'Gliding Dinosaur is Missing Link'. I thought I had been rumbled at last. All the same, it is an honour to have been asked to attend this meeting and to be given the opportunity of addressing you.
It had been my intention to speak on the origins of the GSA and how it had developed from the Association of BAFO Gliding Clubs As it happened, Wally Kahn, whom I first met in Germany in 1946 and last saw at the Nationals at Camphill five years later, recently wrote to me, quite out of the blue, and was kind enough to send me a copy of his excellent and frankly hilarious book, in which he fully and admirably covered my intended subject. I had previously not realised that this was all in the public domain and now feel that anything I might have to add would be old hat to the members. In light of this I thought to take an entirely different approach.

Reading Wally's final chapter, I was struck by his observation that he put back more into the sport than he took out. For my part, I am only too conscious that although I think I put a fair amount into it, gliding became for me, after a sort of honeymoon period, much more a job than a sport, in which my reward was out of all proportion, in that it gave me a full flying career as a pilot in our Service. My progression from SG-38 to the Lightning might make for an interesting talk. I apologise if it comes close to a line-shoot.
I joined the RAF within nine months of the ending of the Battle of Britain, and like almost everyone else at that time who was male and aged 18, I wanted to come as close as I could to The Few - I wanted to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force. My flying instructor in Canada thought otherwise, and sent me off to become one of the last Observers. Commissioned in May 1943, I was retained in Canada as a navigation instructor, and so did not get back to the UK until the end of '44, when I was streamed into the Pathfinder Force. However, on the very day I qualified, Hitler decided to commit suicide (no connection, I assure you!) and so I missed out on ops. Hardly a war to be proud of!

Early 1946 saw me as a seriously under-employed navigator on the staff of Sir Sholto Douglas, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British Zone of Germany and AOC-in-C, British Air Forces of Occupation. Lest that sounds rather grand, I have here an official Air Ministry photo, which shows the great man surrounded by a posse of air correspondents. And there - at the very edge of the photo - is yours truly. It was, indeed, my job to conduct air correspondents anywhere they might want to go in the Zone. The only trouble was that the number of correspondents wanting to write about the British Air Forces of Occupation was rapidly drying up, and so my colleagues and I were left to write our own stories about BAFO units - and that is how I came to the Air Division Gliding Club at Barntrup, not far from Detmold. In May 1946 I was offered a flight in a Kranich - and was utterly captivated. Life was never quite the same again.

Barntrup was one of four service gliding clubs, which were run as a services sports activity, after British forces acquired a number of fully-stocked and staffed former Luftwaffe gliding sites. The secretary was about to leave on demobilisation and I was offered his job. I was given a crash course (no pun intended) by a couple of former Luftwaffe lieutenant colonels, who told me all about how the Germans had used gliding to enthuse youngsters about the air, to create a pool of potential pilots, and as a serious contribution to pilot training. That summer I qualified for Silver C No 69 - among the first ten post-war pilots so to do - and did some 83 hours, mainly from Barntrup but also from Oerlinghausen and the magnificent ridge site at Scharfoldendorf.

About this time the very energetic and enthusiastic Air Commodore G J C (Christopher) Paul took charge of the recently-formed Association of BAFO Gliding Clubs, which held its first competition that summer at Oerlinghausen (nr Bielefeld) . We took part, together with clubs based at Scharfoldendorf (nr Hameln), Minder Heide (nr Minden) and, I believe, Salzgitter (nr Brunswick).

By the end of 1946 most of the original Association members were posted back to the UK, many on demobilisation. I found myself on a Mosquito refresher course and, while there, spent some time writing a paper on the value of gliding training to the Luftwaffe. With some trepidation I sought an interview with the Air Ministry staff officer responsible for flying training, one Wg Cdr Wykeham-Barnes* and presented him with my offering. I suggested, more in jest than hope, that with my German gliding experience, I might make an ideal guinea pig. He ventured that one swallow did not make a summer, so I thought no more about it. Looking back on that interview, I am tempted to think that the wing commander made a mental note, 'if there's anything in this, we might use this chap's experience to benefit pre-entry gliding training'. For amazingly, when the end-of-course postings came through, instead of going with my pilot to a Mosquito squadron, I was posted to the EFTS at Carlisle, whence I progressed to 3 FTS at Feltwell and - at long last, in January 1948 - the coveted flying badge. I know I scraped through with little to spare: if anything, my handling of Tiger Moths and Harvards bore out the wisdom of my erstwhile Canadian flying instructor. However, I had not forgotten about gliding. Half-way through my pilot's course, I managed to fit in the first post-war Nationals at Bramcote. My chief memory was flying my Grunau Baby in a gentle thermal, gradually losing height while, in the same thermal, the great Philip Wills in his Weihe was gaining height. He set off for a long cross-country; I landed back at Bramcote. And while at Feltwell, I hired a sailplane from the Cambridge Gliding Club to make an exhibition of myself at the station open day.

By 1950 I had completed a tour on Lancasters and Lincolns with 35 Squadron, Bomber Command. - and then it was back to gliding: at 64 Group, Heslington Hall (the present campus of York University) I was put in charge of all ATC flying and gliding in the north and north-west of England. There were then some 49 ATC gliding schools throughout the UK, under the control of Reserve and later Home Command, operating mostly at weekends and staffed by instructors commissioned in the Training Branch of the RAFVR, or appointed as civilian instructors. 64 Group controlled eight of these schools.

Up till then most gliding training had been carried out by the solo method, with which I was thoroughly familiar from my days at Barntrup. Cadets progressed through a series of slides and low hops to high hops, from which it might be possible to achieve the 30 seconds' glide required for an 'A' gliding certificate. Only a few of the more promising cadets were taken to the 'B' certificate stage. This method of instruction had been in use since well before the war, and many of the instructors were expert at coaxing cadets into the air and through their certification, without themselves ever getting airborne, save perhaps for the odd air test. Their knowledge of the theory of flight was often quite rudimentary: one enduring myth claimed that gliders should be turned without banking! Accordingly, there were some spectacular accidents, some of which claimed the lives of cadets - and so a better way was sought.

During my tour at Heslington, the two-seater Sedbergh (as well as the Cadet Mk. 3) was coming into use, enabling cadets to be given dual before they went solo. But that in turn required instructors to be capable, not only of flying themselves, but also of giving the correct sequence of instruction. It was not until 1951, if I remember rightly, that a gliding instructors' school was established at RAF Detling. Meanwhile I managed to run summer soaring camps for advanced cadets at the Derby and Lancs Club at Camphill, where several keen cadets completed 5-hr solo flights for their 'Silver C' **. Also, to give my more proficient instructors something to aim at beyond the weekly grind of slides and hops, I entered teams in the 1950 and 51 Nationals at Camphill.

After two years at Heslington I took the CFS course, thence to Liverpool University Air Squadron. At the end of my fist week there - was it that Wykeham-Barnes' career plan for me had kicked in again? - I was ordered to report immediately to Headquarters Home Command at White Waltham, to take over all flying and gliding activities for both ATC and CCF. When I protested that I wanted to put my recently acquired flying instructor's expertise to practical use, my pill was sweetened by promotion to acting squadron leader

The most important development during my tenure was the conversion of the ATC schools to dual instruction, with a sequence based on CFS methods: I was responsible for HCP 21, which became the bible for two-seater instruction. Preparing this involved close co-operation with the instructors' school at Detling and a great many Chipmunk flights from and to White Waltham. The other major landmark was the issue of elementary gliders to selected RAF Sections of the Combined Cadet Force.

It was about this time that Air Commodore Chris Paul formed the RAFGSA. On 24 April 1950 I became member No 24; later I represented the GSA, as well as the interests of ATC gliding, on the BGA Council. In 1956, while on the course at Bracknell., I ran staff college gliding at White Waltham, but that was pretty much the end of my active gliding. The rest of my flying career can be told quite briefly: CFI at Cambridge University Air Squadron; flying the only PR Chipmunk in the RAF, to photograph Soviet military hardware around Berlin; command of my old squadron, No. 35, now a Canberra squadron in Bomber Command; and command of a Lightning station in Fighter Command. Wattisham 1966-68 was certainly the pinnacle, and the icing on the cake was having the Anglia Club on base, enabling me, in any one week, to fly a Lightning at Mach 2 and a Sedbergh at . . . well you know the stalling speed of a T.21 just as well as I do.
Now you might wonder what these two flying machines might have in common, other than the basic flying controls. Well, there are at least two aspects: the attitude of a glider half-way through a winch launch is very similar to the 65 degrees of a Lightning at the beginning of its climb; and when you zoom a Lightning from the tropopause at M 1.4 to see how high you might get, an absolute ceiling of about 63,000 ft is achievable.*** At that point you have about as much control over a Lightning as you have over a T.21 just below its stalling speed. I should just add that during my time at Wattisham I also served as Deputy Chairman of your Association.

So: how much did I give to gliding, and what did I get out of it? I hope I may claim to have made some contribution to developing pre-entry gliding training , which gave thousands of young men - and, for all I know, many girls as well - their first air experience in what it means to be in control of an aircraft, however primitive. My gain was to experience, in many forms, the bliss of silent flight, and to have a full flying career in our Service, in which I flew both the slowest and the fastest aircraft in the inventory. I was equally fortunate with my ground appointments: all of them challenging and fascinating - but that is another story.

Let me end with two [unscripted] tributes: the first one to my wife of 52 years' standing who, on our honeymoon, endured a flight over Paris, courtesy the Ecole Militaire gliding club; and spent some of her first pregnancy at the 1951 Nationals, bending over to place cables 'on' and holding wingtips; and we both look back with pleasure to a staff visit to Camphill in July 1953, ostensibly to monitor ATC entries in that year's Nationals. We spent the night at the Great Hucklow B&B we had used two years previously: our daughter was born nine months later.
My second tribute is to the high professionalism clearly evident in everything I have heard about the GSA at today's meeting - a degree of professionalism, which I know to be characteristic of to-day's Royal Air Force, and was quite undreamt in our philosophy.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention.

* Later Air Marshal Sir Peter Wykeham, KCB DSO OBE DFC AFC, AOC-in-C Fighter Command.
** One of these, Cdt Cpl Bamford, became a senior captain with Malaysian Airlines; another, Cdt Sgt D Spottiswood, retired from the RAF as an Air Vice-Marshal in 1989, having served for 6 years as RAFGSA Chairman.
*** A member of the audience, formerly of the Anglia Club and 111 Squadron, told me that in a similar exercise he had zoomed to 73,000 ft.