Patrick “Quaxi“ Starlinger, born and raised in a small town in Upper Austria, has been interested in aviation since his early childhood. Even though none of his parents or family members have been involved in aviation, he started to grow a big interest, especially in vintage aircraft.

After finishing the statutory education, he attended the four-year Austrian vocational school for being an aircraft mechanic located near Vienna. During this time, he trained and honed his skills for becoming an AMT, always with the vision in his mind to work on vintage aircraft & Warbirds. During the last year at this school, Patrick and three of his classmates overhauled a German Siemens-Halske radial engine, which was used in German Luftwaffe training aircraft during the 30’s and 40’s. This project led to the first contacts with some operators & owners of the European vintage aircraft network.

While serving at the Austrian Air Force he enjoyed working on helicopters, but he was already looking for job opportunities to get his hands on “the right stuff”. This opportunity came shortly after finishing military duty with joining the maintenance department of QUAX vintage flying club located in Paderborn, northern Germany. But after a short period of working there on all sorts of different smaller airplanes, the big door opened for Patrick. He joined The Flying Bulls maintenance team in December 2014 as a member of the T28 restoration team. After a while he also gathered more and more experience with maintaining most of the fleet’s planes and participated as ground crew at different airshows. In 2022 Patrick switched from being full-time AMT to full-time sheet metal mechanic and is now responsible for fabricating sheet metal parts and performing structural repairs. He’s also responsible for doing all the aircraft fabric covering work and is one of the company’s first point of contacts when it comes to find equivalents for obsolete hardware or superseded standards and references.

Shortly after joining The Flying Bulls, Patrick also started his private flying career. He completed his glider pilot license and enjoyed flying gliders in the Austrian Alps for a couple of years. In 2018 he finished his PPL training on a Piper Super Cub and flies all sorts of different tailwheel aircraft ever since. One of his major milestones has been getting hands on one of best handling airplanes ever built – the Bücker Jungmann. He continued with completing his aerobatics rating on the Bücker and loves to perform “Gentlemen’s aerobatics” with it. His efforts and passion with flying vintage aircraft haven’t been unseen by the chief pilot of The Flying Bulls, Raimund Riedmann. He offered Patrick to start flying the company’s Boeing Stearman, equipped with an 450hp Pratt & Whitney R-985. Since then, Patrick is gathering experience with flying the “Super Stearman” and hopes to begin with his aerobatics & display training on the Stearman soon.

Patrick and his girlfriend Nicole, who also has a big interest in vintage aircraft & Warbirds, recently acquired their own little airplane project – a Jodel D11 from the 1950’s. Together they restore the Jodel to flying condition and they’re planning to bring it to all kind of different fly-ins and gatherings in the near future. Both are looking forward to a great future of flying vintage airplanes and keeping them alive for the next generations.