Robin Olds’ Thunderbirds-style F-101 show to dodge brigadier general promotion and command a combat wing in Vietnam

The F-101s put on a spectacular Thunderbirds-style show ending with the signature “bomb-burst” maneuver. The performance had the desired effect. Robin Olds was removed from the promotion list

Following the nuclear standoffs over Berlin and Cuba, both sides began to pull back from the brink in the 1960s. The 81st TRW’s F-101 Voodoos at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge remained on Victor Alert with live nuclear weapons, but the character of the confrontation was shifting. Nuclear weapons were increasingly understood as limiting political and military options, rather than serving as an unquestioned symbol of American strength against the Soviet and Warsaw Pact’s much larger conventional ground forces.

As Ronald Easley explains in The F-101 Voodoo: An Illustrated History of McDonnell’s Heavyweight Fighter, Air Force tactical fighter units had relied on the nuclear delivery mission since the 1950s as the only way to prove their relevance and justify their survival. By the early 1960s, basic skills like dogfighting and conventional combat had been badly neglected. Many people across the U.S. military recognized the problem and its possible consequences, but their concerns went nowhere in a rigid bureaucracy. One of those younger mid-level commanders was World War II ace Robin Olds, who took command of the 81st TFW in August 1963.

The 81st TFW had long been regarded as one of the best units not only in USAFE, but in the entire Air Force. Charismatic, aggressive, and above all highly capable, Colonel Olds quickly began shaping the wing to an even higher standard. He appointed Lt. Col. Daniel “Chappie” James as his executive officer, and the two got to work. Recognizing both the need to preserve conventional warfare skills and the limitations of the Voodoo, Olds started training 81st TFW pilots in gunnery and conventional weapons delivery for possible close air support missions. Even so, the nuclear delivery mission remained the unit’s top priority as its capabilities sharpened. By the middle of his two-year tenure as wing commander, in the summer of 1964, the decision had been made to replace the 81st TFW’s F-101s with the far more capable F-4C Phantom. Like the F-101, the F-4C was fully capable in the nuclear delivery role, but it could also carry an impressive range of short- and long-range air-to-air missiles and conventional weapons, allowing it to handle the much wider set of missions NATO would need in the years ahead.

In his mid-40s, as his time with the 81st TFW was drawing to an end in 1965, the war in Vietnam was escalating. Although he held what was arguably the best job in the Air Force, Colonel Olds wanted only one thing while a war was underway: to lead men into combat. After World War II, he had been assigned to an air defense unit when the Korean War began, but he was never able to get there.

At that point in his career in 1965, Olds knew the next step would likely be a general’s stars and a desk job, not the kind of front-line leadership that came naturally to him. Eager to get into the fighting in Vietnam, Robin Olds took a major risk. He saw a chance not only to improve his pilots’ skill and morale, but also to showcase their abilities publicly and, in his view, use his superiors’ caution to remove himself from consideration for brigadier general so he could stay a colonel and position himself to command a combat wing in Vietnam. With the spring Open House season approaching, Col. Olds decided to create and lead a four-ship F-101 demonstration team. The other pilots were C.R. Morgan, Tom Hirsch, and “Ski” Fantaski, with Fantaski assigned as the slot pilot.

As they rehearsed, word eventually reached General Gabriel P. Disosway, the USAFE commander and an old friend, who discreetly told Olds that his actions violated safety regulations and that he needed to stop at once before someone was injured. Olds and his team still appeared at the scheduled open house at RAF Mildenhall, but instead of making the usual fast, low-level pass, they flew what Olds later called a “nice, safe formation barrel roll” over the runway. They then returned to Bentwaters and put on a dramatic Thunderbirds-style display that ended with the signature “bomb-burst” maneuver. The performance had the intended result. Olds’s immediate superior demanded a court-martial, while USAFE Commander Disosway summoned the famously stubborn colonel to his office for an intense dressing-down. His Legion of Merit citation for the change-of-command ceremony was torn up, a highly negative evaluation was entered, and Olds was told he had been taken off the promotion list. Olds then stood, saluted crisply, told General Disosway that this was exactly what he had wanted, and excused himself from the general’s office.

Colonel Olds’s change of command in August 1965 совпided with the 81st TFW’s retirement of the F-101. Sent to Ninth Air Force headquarters at Shaw AFB to lie low until the controversy faded, the fiery combat ace arranged a transfer to Southeast Asia and, six months later, was on his way to command the 8th Fighter Wing, an F-4C unit in Thailand struggling with morale and other problems. Drawing on the strong leadership partnership he had built at the 81st TFW, Olds brought Chappie James with him, and together—known as “Blackman and Robin”—they started to reverse the wing’s troubles. Meanwhile, the old Voodoos were slated to be converted into reconnaissance aircraft and spend their remaining years with the Air National Guard. For both the men and the aircraft, the rest is history.

“The F-101 Voodoo an Illustrated History of McDonnell’s heavyweight Fighter” is published by Schiffer Publishing and is available to order here.

Photo by U.S. Air Force and RuthAS Own work via Wikipedia