Born to the air.
“I’ve done a hundred things you have not dreamed of.”
Photo: Peter Handley
Ulrich Bollinger was born to fly. The desire was always there. Perhaps he caught the bug watching floatplanes lifting off the Ottawa River, their pontoons resonating with the reciprocal thunder of their pistons. Perhaps it was a desire to move out, above and beyond the confines of his small village in the wilderness. Whatever sparked his love of flight, it was a powerful fuel, because it burned bright for the rest if his life.
Ulrich flew a wide range of aircraft from supersonic CF-104 fighters to plodding Challenger ultralights — both of which were prone to engine failures. With is left hand on the throttle and his right on the stick, Bollinger saw the world as many would never see it. Leonardo DaVinci, who would never leave the earth or see what Bollinger saw, penned a prescient reflection about flying:
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
Though DaVinci wrote that more than 400 years before Bollinger was born, it was most certainly written for him.
He even learned to fly helicopters in the Air Force which he insisted on calling “whop-whops”, checking out on the nimble Bell CH-136 Kiowa. While it was no Starfighter, he surely rejoiced in the nap-of-the-earth flying that the Kiowa was used for — picking branches out of the skids after each mission, hovering over frozen lakes and sifting down stream beds below the radar.
His love of flying was connected to his love of the men and women who flew aircraft. Wherever they were, there was Ulrich. Talking flying. Hands flying. Laughter booming from his listeners. The smell of fuel and oil on the air. The shriek of turbojets or the high energy buzz of a Rotax assaulting his ears. This was his happy place.
Bollinger experienced more of aviation than most pilots, even airline or military. He broke the sound barrier sitting in a seat at the front end of a Starfighter with the strap-on spurs of his boots clipped to cables that would yank his feet back during an ejection to prevent leaving them behind.
He sat on a dirty sheepskin in the right seat of a tired old Falcon 20, flying out of Saint John in the middle of the night bound for the middle of nowhere — a distant rumble in the night sky, a blinking light and a ghostly moonlit vapour trail drifting with the winds aloft when the world below was sound asleep. The lonely aviator a million miles from the glory of Starfighters, but in love with the work, the navigation and the precision of it all.
He bounced and frisked in summer skies, wrestling his Quad City Challenger ultralight through hot afternoon burbles and gut-punch updrafts and kept an ear cocked for any unfamiliar sound that might harbinger an engine failure… again.
He cadged rides when ever he could — twice in the mighty F-4 Phantom with some Yankee squadron in Europe. He was always ready to fill a back seat and the intercom with his wisdom. Men like Todd Lemieux and Bruce Evans learned from his experience. Like monks at the foot of a pandit, a blaspheming mahatma.
Bollinger shared much of his flying life with his old squadron mate Rob Fleck. They each owned Quad City Challenger ultralights and went off for many (slow) adventures together. In 2008, Rob Fleck, at the time an Air Canada captain, would take a leave of absence to become president of Vintage Wings of Canada and invite Ulrich Bollinger to bring his experience and leadership skills to the pilot cadre. It was another happy time in Ulrich’s life, on the road with a new “squadron”, riding herd on a diverse fleet of aircraft with varying capabilities, getting to the same place at roughly the same time. Civilian pilots are not the same as military pilots. He learned that. Some did what they wanted to do and not what they were told to do. His leadership and the example he set brought everyone through safely through a gruelling summer of flying.
Some of those kids they flew that summer are now pilots serving with the RCAF. Even fighter pilots.
One thing Bollinger longed for was a mission — blowing up commies in the Fulda Gap; sharing the experience of flight with young people; making a photographer dizzy in the back seat of a photo mission; bringing Christmas presents from Grandma in Oromocto to the grandkids in Calgary; or the hundred dollar hamburger.
On the day he left us, Ulrich Bollinger had just returned from a mission — a “second breakfast” in Arnprior with his old pal Fleck. It’s all very sad, but that’s the way he would have wanted to go. Fresh from the saddle, the Bushcaddy put to bed. Returning to his farm and the woman he loved.
From Starfighter to Bushcaddy
