Fighter pilot legend. Triple Ace. Multiple combat victories against Messerschmitts and MiGs. Married to a Hollywood actress. Son of a General, who became a General himself. College football star. Best Wing Commander in Vietnam. Hard-drinking mustached maverick, who eventually was Commandant of the Air Force Academy. Robin Olds had an amazing career. But let’s look here at some of his (almost sensitive) writing on flying.
He first flew at the age of eight, in an open cockpit biplane with his father, a former WWI instructor pilot who became an accomplished aviator and Major General in the United States Army Air Force. In the 2010 book Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds he recalls the ‘saddest event of my young life’:
“ As my beloved father lay dying I held his hand and told him I was going to be a fighter pilot. He smiled weakly at me and said, “Robbie, listen to me. I never once went up in the air without learning something new. Never, ever think you know it all.” He died at noon the following Tuesday. ”
Great dad advice. His flying record shows the son kept learning. And it’s clear that Robin Olds also really loved flying. In the same book he describes training flights:
“ More solo flights were sheer joy. Being alone in the immense sky, master of plane and self, was beyond anything I had imagined. Practicing what I’d been taught, and experimenting further into the envelope of possibilities, worked a magic I can only describe as ecstasy. It was total exuberance, surrender and mastery all at once. ”
He went on to become a WWII ace in both the P-38 (5 victories) and the P-51 (8 victories). But it was a later war, in jets, that saw Olds rise to legendary status. He stopped at four Migs because he would have been sent back Stateside at five. He kept flying combat to led others to victory. The prologue of the 2017 book Phantom Boys Volume 2: More Thrilling Tales From UK and US Operators of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 is a piece written by Olds from that time, around 1966 or 67, when he was commander of the Eighth Tactical Fighter Wing. This is first class stuff:
“ She receives me and my backseater, and we become a part of her as we attach ourselves to her with straps and hoses and plugs and connectors. A surge of juice and a blast of compressed air and she comes alive. We are as one – tied together – the machine an extension of the man – her hydraulics my muscles – her sensors my eyes – her mighty engines my power. ”
Sounds almost new age. You can hear Olds voice in the still cool 1988 BBC documentary Reaching for the Skies:
“ Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there’s something else — there’s a spark. There’s a desire to be good. To do well; In the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.
I think it is love of that blue vault of sky that becomes your playground if, and only if, you are a fighter pilot. You don’t understand it if you fly from A to B in straight and level, and merely climb and descend. you’re moving through the basement of that bolt of blue.
A fighter pilot is a man in love with flying. A fighter pilot sees not a cloud but beauty. Not the ground but something remote from him, something that he doesn’t belong to as long as he is airborne. He’s a man who wants to be second-best to no one. ”
Spine tingling stuff. The fighter legend was lots of things, but it seems clear he practiced perpetual pursuit of excellence, loved flying, and didn’t sit down on a seat in a cockpit, but become a part of her.
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