Recreated 1960s "Flight of Passage"

What were you doing when you were seventeen? Did your grandfather ever let you borrow his car? How about his nearly 60-year-old airplane?

Inspired by Rinker Buck's classic "Flight of Passage," that chronicled two teenage brothers on their flight around America, seventeen-year-old cousins Ben Dunkerly and Nick Reed returned last Sunday to their home field in Hampton, NH after flying 6,000 miles across the continental United States in their grandfather's 1946 Aeronca Champ.

"We read the book and thought to ourselves, ‘We could do that,’" said Reed to the Portsmouth (NH) Herald News.

"Our trip was exactly like the book except we’re cousins, not brothers."

Dunkerly and Reed started thinking about the trip last summer, after getting their pilots licenses but didn’t start planning the trip in the two-seat plane until November... and just as teenagers do, they told their parents about their idea around Christmas time, after their plans were in place.

"At first our parents didn’t want us to go but they came around," Reed, a senior in high school, said. "We had to work for our grandfather to save up money for the trip."

After being turned around by a snapped brake cable in New York, the cousins once again set off on their journey on July 20 with about $2,500 between them, mostly for avgas. Flying an Aeronca meant that the boys only had four square feet of cargo space to store all their belongings: two sleeping bags, some clothes, a cell phone and a map.

The cousins flew round trip through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Once they reached California (a trip that took six days) the cousins stayed with their uncle, Matt Guilfoyle, for two weeks before heading back to New Hampshire. The Buck brothers also had a cousin they stayed with in California.

Reed and Dunkerly spent many nights camped under the wings of the Aeronca, just as the Bucks did in "Flight of Passage."

"Everyone we talked to on our trip, especially the older pilots, said they wished they did that when they were young," Dunkerly said.

The boys were blessed by blue skies for most of their trip, although they ran into a severe storm over Kansas on the trip home. "The clouds were getting lower so we kept having to fly lower," Dunkerly said. "We were taught from day one how to deal with emergencies. We kept circling around the area to find the private strip and just followed some railroad tracks."

Once Dunkerly and Reed landed at the small private landing strip to wait out the storm, the owner drove out and offered the boys breakfast. He also invited the boys to stay in his guest house for the evening.

There were a few other close calls along the way. When they landed at an airfield in Texas during a windy day, a gust came along and spun their plane 180 degrees and a wing tapped the ground.

"We thought we were going to flip over," Reed said.

Between the two of them, Dunkerly and Reed logged 290 flight hours on the trip. The cousins said they don’t intend to write a book on their journey like Buck, but hope to do it again someday.

"It was way worth it," Dunkerly said. 

Both boys plan on becoming career pilots after finishing college.

FMI: www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0697/buck/auexcerpt.html