Brig. Gen. Robin Olds: A Fighter Pilot's Fighter Pilot

Brigadier General Robin Olds was born in 1920s Honolulu. As a young man, he graduated West Point and was an All-American on the gridiron. 

However, even with those accomplishments, he still had big shoes to fill...

Olds was the son of Major General Robert Olds, former aide to maverick pioneer Billy Mitchell, one of the individuals who played an instrumental part in the founding of the USAF. 

And who did Olds meet growing up near Langley Field in Virginia? His father's friends Eddie Rickenbacker and Fiorello LaGuardia, among other luminaries.

Brig. Gen. Robin Olds learned firsthand what military aviation excellence looked like. And his life was a testament to how well he applied those lessons. 

By the age of 22, Olds was a WWII aviator commanding a fighter squadron over occupied Europe in a P-51 Mustang, finishing the war with 12 aerial kills and 11.5 more destroyed on the ground.

The thing is...peacetime had no idea what to do with the man. Olds was supposed to be the assistant football coach at West Point after WWII, but that quickly changed.

Soon, he was in the cockpit of a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star after a transfer to the 412th Fighter Group, right where he belonged.

In September 1966, at the age of 44, Olds took command of the Wolf Pack, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, in Thailand. There, he found a demoralized wing. So he fixed it the way he fixed everything, with skin in the game; he put his name at the bottom of the flight schedule and told pilots half his age to train him properly because he'd be leading them soon. And he did.

Olds was also the man behind OPERATION BOLO, where he led F-4C Phantoms into North Vietnamese airspace disguised as the lumbering F-105s that enemy MiGs had been picking apart for months. The North Vietnamese took the bait. Seven MiG-21s went down without any American losses. Olds personally downed one of them. 

The result? North Vietnamese air ops in the region shut down for weeks.

259 combat missions, 107 in World War II and 152 more in Southeast Asia, with 16 confirmed kills across two wars. Olds was a Triple Ace.

Brig. Gen. Robin Olds died on June 14th 2007. He's buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs.

Olds was a fighter pilot's fighter pilot, a brilliant, gritty warrior and tactician who not only loved his country, but served it and served it damn well. That's why we remember him not just this Memorial Day, but every day. 

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