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.