Gunslinger Starfighter Pilot
A born warrior, Ulrich’s days as a Canadian Starfighter fighter pilot were his finest. He lived and breathed the ethos — spurs on his boots, fine leather gloves, zippers galore, flight suit open to his heart, patches signalling his prowess. He wasn’t just show though, he was the real deal. He had what Tom Wolf would later call “the right stuff.” He thought at the speed of sound and spoke at the speed of a Saskatchewan farmer, confident in his ability to bend the will of his jet to the mission at hand. He was tearing up the skies on the frontline of history, keeping the Soviet horde from turning us all into robots, saving our children from a nuclear holocaust. In the days before fighter pilots anointed themselves with non-de-guerre callsigns, Ulrich Bollinger was known simply as “Rick”.
Bollinger learned to fly on the Chipmunk and Harvard, two aircraft he would later fly and lead with Vintage Wings of Canada. Once he got his wings in the 1960s, he joined 414 Squadron in St. Hubert, QC flying the Avro CF-100 Canuck — known as the “Clunk” by its detractors. Bollinger’s skills were far ahead of the heavy defensive fighter, but when his short service commission timed out, the RCAF did not need his services as a fighter pilot and he turned to Air Traffic Control, working the towers at North Bay and Petawawa. Every take-off he approved must have burned in his stomach, for he was every inch a fighter pilot and more.
“Straight Flush” — this photograph, loved by all Starfighter pilots, hung in the officer’s mess at CFB Cold Lake during Bollinger’s time there.
A few years later, the Air Force needed fighter pilots again and Ulrich was welcomed back into the fold, but his first posting was to CFB Moose Jaw, SK where he became an instructor on the Canadair CT-114 Tutor, the long-lived jet trainer we still see in the skies today with the Canadian Forces Snowbirds. Out on the bald Saskatchewan prairie, the skies were endless, the flying constant, and the bars open.
There was not much to do on a Canadian air base back then (and today for that matter), so Ulrich joined his instructor comrades in the local watering holes to trade stories and search for companionship — long-gone establishments like the Matador Steak House and Royal Hotel on River Street, where Bollinger found himself on weekends dancing to the cowboy melodies of Yvonne and the Plainsmen — a “Loretta Lynn Situation” in the words of his friend and Moose Javian Todd Lemieux.
After paying his dues at The Jaw, he was posted to the CF-104 OTU at Cold Lake, coming up to speed first on the CF-5 Freedom Fighter, and then on to the most challenging and touchy aircraft in the Canadian Forces inventory — the supersonic CF-104 Starfighter. The year was 1977.
Soon, he found himself on 421 Squadron in Germany on the outer edge of the free world — flying bombing profiles and pushing the limits of the Starfighter. He was selected to join the “Starfighters” a 104 demonstration team which appeared at NATO air shows in Europe.
The Starfighter was an uncompromising fighter aircraft, one that even some Starfighter pilots feared. Of the 238 104s that served with the RCAF and CAF, an astounding 110 were lost due to accidents with 37 pilots killed. 421 Squadron lost 34 of their CF-104 aircraft. One of those losses was a Starfighter piloted by Captain “Rick” Bollinger. On August 19, 1978, while on a low-level training flight from Baden-Soellingen, Bollinger’s Starfighter experienced an engine failure after the ingestion of a large bird. As Bollinger would later say: "the cockpit smelled of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the annunciator panel lit up like a Christmas tree." He tried unsuccessfully to relight, but was forced to eject at very low altitude, landing near the German town of Oberthal not far from Luxembourg. That day, Ulrich joined the membership of the Caterpillar Club, the society of people who have saved their lives with a parachute. For this he received a ruby-eyed caterpillar brooch, the symbol of club membership. The caterpillar was symbolic of the early parachutes which were made of silk.
Bollinger would end his Starfighter time with a second tour of 1CAG in the early 80s, where he squadron hopped from 439 to 441 and even back to 421 as Starfighter operations wound down in Europe with the advent of the CF-18 Hornet era. As an old gunslinger fighter pilot, he followed the Starfighter into the sunset still wearing his spurs.
The years on squadron in West Germany were so formative. He went in with his hair on fire and came out with his future bride Christiane, a school teacher on the base at Baden-Soellingen. The relationship would remain strong to the last day of his life.
After his Starfighter days were over, Bollinger was back with 414 Squadron as the detachment commander of the T-33 “shop” in Ottawa for those poor pilots condemned to fly the mahogany bomber (desk job) at Nation Defence Headquarters to keep current with jet flying. He ran the shop for two “tours”. He would have gratefully flown T-33s and run the shop to his dying day.
