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.