By Rinker Buck
A daring transcontinental flight adventure
Subject
Themes
In 1966, two teenage brothers undertake an audacious transcontinental flight across America in a twenty-year-old Piper Cub. Seventeen-year-old Kernahan Buck, barely licensed to fly, convinces his younger brother Rinker to join him on a journey from New Jersey to California. The boys spend the winter meticulously rebuilding their father's decrepit aeroplane in the family barn, preparing for a voyage that seems impossible to everyone around them.
In 1966, two teenage brothers undertake an audacious transcontinental flight across America in a twenty-year-old Piper Cub. Seventeen-year-old Kernahan Buck, barely licensed to fly, convinces his younger brother Rinker to join him on a journey from New Jersey to California. The boys spend the winter…
Published in 1966, though describing events from that same year, Flight of Passage arrived during a crucial moment in American cultural history when the nation stood poised between post-war confidence and emerging counter-cultural skepticism. The memoir's celebration of individualism, daring, and…
Tom Buck's presence dominates every aspect of his sons' lives, shaping their ambitions and insecurities in equal measure. A self-made man who transformed himself from a Depression-era Pennsylvania runaway into a successful New York publisher, Tom built his identity on the romantic narrative of his…
The Buck brothers begin their story as polar opposites trapped in a toxic relationship. Kern, the eldest, embodies shyness and vulnerability, a classic firstborn son terrified of failing to meet his iron-willed father's expectations. Small for his age with feathery auburn hair and trusting brown…
For the Buck family, aviation transcends recreation or career to become the primary language through which identity, ambition, and freedom find expression. Tom Buck's barnstorming years during the 1930s represent not merely youthful adventure but his fundamental education and pathway to…
The Buck brothers' transcontinental flight succeeds precisely because they possess insufficient knowledge to recognize its impossibility. At seventeen and fifteen, with Kern barely past one hundred logged hours and having never piloted beyond the Delaware River, they propose crossing an entire…
The memoir emerges three decades after the journey it describes, written by an adult Rinker Buck who explicitly acknowledges the complex relationship between memory, truth, and storytelling. He confesses carrying around the trip's mementos for years (old flight logs, fuel records, maps, yellowing…
The Buck family operates according to its own eccentric logic, where audacious schemes that sound insane in abstract somehow become reality through sheer determination. Tom Buck, the patriarch, embodies this philosophy completely. Standing six feet four inches with massive shoulders, missing his…
Winter transforms the Buck barn into an aviation workshop as Kern and Rinker disassemble the battered Piper Cub and begin their ambitious rebuild. The aircraft, purchased two years earlier for three hundred dollars, requires complete overhaul to survive a transcontinental journey. The brothers…
Summer 1966 arrives with the Piper Cub finally airworthy and the brothers' departure imminent. Tom Buck orchestrates the event with characteristic flair, ensuring journalists and photographers attend their takeoff from the small New Jersey airstrip. Jack Elliott from the Newark Star Ledger arrives…
Crossing into Ohio and beyond brings the brothers into America's agricultural heartland, where vast farms stretch to every horizon and small towns punctuate endless fields of corn and wheat. The landscape's flatness provides welcome relief from Pennsylvania's mountain challenges, though new…
The Rocky Mountains represent the journey's supreme test, a physical barrier that threatens to end the brothers' adventure before they reach California. Their father's initial objection ('How the hell are you going to get a Piper Cub over the Rockies? What pass are you going to fly?') haunts them as…
Descending from the Rockies into the southwestern deserts introduces the brothers to landscape utterly unlike anything in their New Jersey experience. Vast expanses of sand, rock, and scrubland stretch endlessly, punctuated by occasional towns that seem impossibly isolated. The summer heat creates…
California finally appears on the horizon, the Pacific coast representing both journey's end and profound beginning. The brothers cross the final desert stretches and climb over the coastal ranges, descending toward Los Angeles with emotions mixing triumph, exhaustion, and unexpected melancholy.…
By Rinker Buck
Subject
Themes
In 1966, two teenage brothers undertake an audacious transcontinental flight across America in a twenty-year-old Piper Cub. Seventeen-year-old Kernahan Buck, barely licensed to fly, convinces his younger brother Rinker to join him on a journey from New Jersey to California. The boys spend the winter meticulously rebuilding their father's decrepit aeroplane in the family barn, preparing for a voyage that seems impossible to everyone around them.