GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Robin Olds


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There are 11 quotes matching Robin Olds in the collection:


The best way to defend the bombers is to catch the enemy before it his in position to attack. Catch them when they are taking off, or when they are climbing, or when they are forming up. don’t think you can defend the bomber by circling around him. It's good for the bombers morale, and bad for tactics.

Attributed to Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF

The most important thing is to have a flexible approach… . The truth is no one knows exactly what air fighting will be like in the future. We can't say anything will stay as it is, but we also can't be certain the future will conform to particular theories, which so often, between the wars, have proved wrong.

Brigadier General Robin Olds USAF

Quoted in Contrails, the 1995/96 U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Handbook.

Anybody who doesn’t have fear is an idiot. It’s just that you must make the fear work for you. Hell, when somebody shot at me, it made me madder than hell, and all I wanted to do was shoot back.

Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF

17 combat victories in WWII and Vietnam. Undated quote cited by USAF website at www.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2000446288/

A fighter without a gun … is like an airplane without a wing.

Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF

17 combat victories in WWII and Vietnam. Quoted in the 1977 book F-4 Phantom.

The picture is with his F-4C Phanton II Scat XXVII in Vietnam. He named all the aircraft he flew in combat sequentially after his West Point academy roommate, Scat Davis, whose eyesight prevented him from continuing through flight school. The aircraft also displays the insignia of the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron, "Satan's Angels", and two red MiG stars showing combat victories. The plane now sits inside the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

Robin Olds next to his F-4

There are pilots and there are pilots; with the good ones, it is inborn. You can’t teach it. If you are a fighter pilot, you have to be willing to take risks.

Attributed to General Robin Olds, USAF.

When I took over my wing [in Vietnam], the big talk wasn’t about the MIG’s, but about the SAM’s … I’d seen enemy planes before, but those damn SAM’s were something else. When I saw my first one, there were a few seconds of sheer panic, because that’s a most impressive sight to see that thing coming at you. You feel like a fish about to be harpooned. There’s something terribly personal about the SAM; it means to kill you and I’ll tell you right now, it rearranges your priorities … We had been told to keep our eyes on them and not to take any evasive move too soon, because they were heat-seeking and they, too would correct, so I waited until it was almost on me and then I rolled to the right and it went on by. It was awe inspiring … The truth is you never do get used to the SAM’s; I had about two hundred fifty shot at me and the last one was as inspiring as the first. Sure I got cagey, and I was able to wait longer and longer, but I never got overconfident. I mean, if you’re one or two seconds too slow, you’ve had the schnitzel.

General Robin Olds

USAF. Quoted in the 2006 book Aviation Century: War and Peace in the Air

It got more exciting with each war. I mean the planes were going faster than hell when I was flying a Mustang, but by the time I got to Nam, it scared the piss out of a lot of guys just to fly the damn jets at full speed. Let alone do it in combat.

Attributed to Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF

There’s a lot of Hollywood bullshit about flying. I mean, look at the movies about test pilots or fighter pilots who face imminent death. The controls are jammed or something really important has fallen off the plane, and these guys are talking like magpies; their lives are flashing past their eyes, and they’re flailing around in the cockpit. It just doesn’t happen. You don’t have time to talk. you’re too damn busy trying to get out of the problem you’re in to talk or ricochet around the cockpit. Or think about what happened the night after your senior prom.

Brigadier General Robin Olds

USAF.

General Robin Olds

A determined air armada loaded with modern agencies of destruction, in readiness within range of our great centers of population and industry, may eventually prove to be a more convincing argument against war than all the Hague and Geneva Conventions put together.

Captain Robert Olds, USAAF

Testimony before the Howell Commission, November 1934. Quoted in the 1998 book The Army and Its Air Corps: Army Policy Towards Aviation, 1919-1941. The captain became a general, but is maybe best known now as the father of triple ace Robin Olds.

One thing was to know how to fly the airplane. He has to know it, to love to fly, to be aggressive and to have good eyeballs and to know how to use them. I’d say he has to have an instinctive capability for air fighting. …Fighting spirit one must have. Even if a man lacks some of the other qualifications, he can often make up for it in fighting spirit.

Brigadier General Robin Olds, USAF

Triple ace, with 17 combat victories in WWII and the Vietnam War. Quoted in the 1972 book Fighter Tactics and Strategy 1914 - 1970. At the time he said this, he was Comandant of Cadets at the Air Force Academy, after commanding the 8th Wing at Ubon, Thailand, during the Vietnam War.

Robin Olds

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.

Brigadier General Robin Olds

USAF. Interview in 1988 BBC documentary Reaching for the Skies. He was a triple ace, with a combined total of 17 victories in World War II and the Vietnam War.

Robin Olds .


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