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.