Robin Olds

Extraordinarily talented landing signal officer.

And he had this giant, kinda reminds me a little bit of Robin Olds.

But Bug Roach had this giant, Vietnam veteran, giant handlebar mustache, completely out of regs.

Wore his flight suit, you know, with the zipper all the way done down to his navel, and just talked like he was your bro, no matter how junior you were.

It is well before sunrise, and somewhere on that ramp a colonel with a truly magnificent mustache is standing in front of 48 aircrews about to brief them on the most elaborate air combat deception anyone had pulled off since the Second World War.

His name is Robin Olds.

What he is about to do will change the air war over North Vietnam in approximately 12 minutes.

I'm Tail Dragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

The losses were unsustainable.

Good airplanes and good aircrews were being lost to a tactical problem that felt, from the outside, like a puzzle without a solution.

The man who solved it was Colonel Robin Olds.

Olds had taken command of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Yuban in September of 1966.

[laughs]

Well, after where it says r- r- bro- mover needs a Robin Olds mustache.

No, it's more of a Chris Hansen have a seat over there mustache.

[laughs]

... because of 9/11.

Yeah.

Well, Horse says, "Mover, you should get the full," yeah, "Robin Olds because Robin Olds will always be cool." But not Mover-

That's true

And so I just think the world of it.

Essential reading by far, "Fighter Pilot" by Robin Olds is essential reading.

Close to that is Thud Ridge.

They, they're so connected with each other because they're rebellious in the most loving ways towards the Air Force, trying to make the institution more lethal, more better, more tied back to its past.

Not just because he could fly, lots of people could fly.

Robin Olds could think, he had a tactical mind that looked at a problem from the enemy's perspective and worked backward from there.

What does my opponent expect? What does he plan for? And how do I give him something entirely different? Fast forward to 1966.

Olds is a colonel, and he gets command of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Yuban Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, the Wolf Pack.

Olds divided his Phantoms into multiple flights, each named after an American automobile brand.

One of those flights was called Olds Flight.

Colonel Robin Olds flew an Olds Flight personally.

He never said whether the naming was coincidence or a private joke.

You've got to go back to a football field at West Point and a kid who was faster and more aggressive than anyone had a reason to expect.

Robin Olds was born in 1922.

His father, Robert Olds, was an Army Air Corps officer, so aviation wasn't something Robin discovered later in life.

It was the water he swam in growing up.

He understood at a cellular level.

And then Vietnam started to heat up.

In 1966, Robin Olds was given command of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.

They called themselves the Wolfpack.

I mentioned the one story that I went into was the Operation Bolo one for the Vietnamese side.

And I was like, wow, they carried the story forward thinking that the Vietnamese thought it was F-105s coming over when they had no idea that it was, you know, Mr. Mustache Robin Olds pretending, you know, he was, him and his flight were 105s, but they were actually, you know, fully armed and operational F-4s.

And jumping into these F4s with the MiG-21 and that being the story and the result of it, I thought that was pretty cool.

I thought that was pretty cool.