N83729 Checkerboard rudder

The Champ under construction December 2010

Flight of Passage

This is how Rinker Buck described the first leg after leaving Somerset County Airport: We waved goodbye to my mother, taxied down to the end of Runway 28, ran up the engine and cleared the controls. As soon as Kern ruddered onto the strip and firewalled the throttle, I loved that Cub. I looked back several times at my father as he waved, wiggling the wings for him a couple of more times. As we climbed through 3,000 feet I could just barely make out through the haze our first navigation checkpoint, the big manmade reservoir at Clinton. As soon as we got out over the Delaware River, barely fifty miles from home, we could see what kind of trouble we were in. Menacing and black anvil-head clouds, their tops silver-bright in the sun, towered up on our right, blocking our planned route to the northwest. After Quakertown the air turned rough and the visibility was constantly changing. . . we were “scud running” trying to get below and between the clouds. Kern was flying us from airport to airport in case the weather forced us down. But after Pottstown there weren’t any strips for a long stretch. The weather had formed a narrow, irregular chute forcing us to divert south through Harrisburg and the lower Susquehanna Valley. On the map I found a rail line just south of Pottstown that meandered west to the Susquehanna, up through Reading and Hershey. We followed the rails into Hershey, crossed the Susquehanna south of Harrisburg and flew on to the small grass strip at Carlisle.

1946 Aeronca Champ N83729

This is the 1946 Aeronca Champ I just bought in December 2009. After some work this summer, N83729 will be the plane I fly across the country.

Aeronca Champ Coast to Coast

In the summer of 1966, two teenagers, one a 17 year old newly licensed pilot, Kernahan Buck, the other, his 15 year old brother, Rinker Buck, set off in a Piper from Somerset NJ and flew to California, landing at Brown Field in San Diego in only 6 days, sleeping beneath the wings of their airplane each night. Along the way, they found adventures. In 1997, Rinker Buck wrote a book about that life-changing adventure, aptly named Flight of Passage. It was two years after Rinker and Kernahan Buck completed their coast to coast adventure, in the spring of 1968, that my brother, Jim Haldeman, and I bought a yellow and black classic Piper J-3 Cub – N42736. I learned how to fly in that Cub, so I felt a kinship to some of the flying adventures described in the Flight of Passage. Now, after 41 years and 4,000 hours of flying, including two trips to Alaska, I yearn to experience the type of adventure that the Buck brothers had -- low and slow across the country, to retrace the Buck brothers’ coast-to-coast flight 44 years later. In preparation for this adventure, for each leg of the flight, I typed excerpts from Flight of Passage, mapped out the route of flight and planned the trip over the same routes and landing at the same airports that the Buck brothers did in 1966. I plan to fly the same route in the summer of 2010. I do not plan to carry a waterbag! (You have to read the book to understand that one.)

It's not the Destination; it's the Journey.