Customer Reviews

Flight of Passage: A Memoir

5 star:		(81)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Flight of Passage" goes deep within the human heart of brothers, sons and fathers. It is not often in this day and age that we are given this masculine insight of two brothers and their love for each other. Nor, are we given such a privleged look into the relationship of a father and his sons.

The airplane (espcially the Piper Cub) is a metaphor. The boys learn how to cherish life, to be good men, to be good citizens in fact from their work on this small airplane as it cruises across the United States.

And, do they cross the U.S.! Strangly we are given the rare opportunity to see our nation from the air, with the eyes of teenagers who believe in themselves, their dad and their Piper Cub. We meet the men and women of America as the Piper lands in strange little airports in the midwest, the south west and the California coast. Not only do they fly out, they fly back to New Jersey. What the brothers discover is the grandness of this country, qualities that bind this country together, and the things that make each region unique.

This is not a travelogue. This is a coming of age story that touches the heart -- deeply.

Flight of Passage is an amazing book. I picked it up in 1998 when I saw the cover picture of a Piper Cub. I had flown a bunch of "orientation flights" in a Cub when I was a teenager in Civil Air Patrol in the late sixties. Although it was not official flight instruction, cadets were allowed to do everything but land the airplane. I learned a lot and loved every minute of it - flying low and slow with the door open, learning the basic air work, even the smell of the engine oil on a hot summer day. I wanted to be a pilot, but college, music, work, and marriage led me on a few different paths until my late forties, when I finally started taking flight lessons.

Events at the time were making it difficult to keep the lessons going, and reading this book inspired me to keep at it even if I had to take a few breaks from the lessons. The teenage Buck brothers did a lot more with their Cub than I ever did, but the book sure brought back the memories and the romance of flying. Rinker Buck creates a vivid picture of the life and times of his interesting family and of the late 1960's, in addition to writing one of the best "you are there" flying adventures I have ever read. Highly recommended even if you are not a big fan of flying books - it's a really good read.

But for me, the book had an even bigger role to play. I happened to meet Kern Buck at a Jiffy-Lube in Massachusetts in 1999. I overheard his name and asked him if he was related to the "Flight of Passage" boys, and he said he was Rinker Buck's brother, the pilot in the book! We talked for a while about flying, and it turns out that he had just updated his flight instructor certification after a break of a few years (he is an attorney now, working in the Boston area). I was also coming back from a break in my lessons and looking for a new instructor. Kern signed on as a part-time instructor at the small airport where I was flying at the time, and I took around 8 lessons with him before I had to take another break (buying a house and moving). Kern was a great instructor and really helped me make progress with my landings. I finally completed my lessons in early 2001 (with yet another instructor) and passed my private pilot check ride that May.

Last summer (2004) I decided to start working on a tail-wheel endorsement, and I found a local instructor who owns and teaches in a Piper Cub. I hadn't flown in a Cub since 1968, and the memories came flooding back once I squeezed myself into the back seat and Ed turned the prop to start the engine. This prompted me to re-read Flight of Passage and I enjoyed it even more as I was experiencing once again the pure flying fun of the spunky little Piper Cub.

Flight of Passage is a fine piece of writing and one of my favorite books.

With a father, three brothers, two sisters-in-law, a niece, and several nephews who fly or have flown or soloed, and a few hours toward soloing myself, this book had instant appeal for me. Brother Jim's wife, Chris, recommended it to me and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Rinker Buck does a grand job of telling his story; the whole story not just the mind-boggling, spectacular flight across the country he and his brother, Kern, took as teenagers. The book is well written; easy and absorbing to read. This is not a book you will want to read quickly. I have not finished it and am in no hurry to do so. The story is to be savored; parts read and re-read. There are some photographs included which always adds to the appeal of a story about real people. (Two of my brothers soloed at 16. With a ten-year age difference between them, the older one soloed the younger one. It made all the local papers.)

The relationship between the boys and their father is compelling, as is the fact that this is a family of eleven children, which makes for a pretty terrific mother, as well as a barnstorming, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants pilot for a father.

Read and enjoy!

Carolyn Rowe Hill

I just finished this book and I have to dispute the review offered here by Gordon Reade. First, the book has very few swear words. Second, the "night of drinking" is actually a road trip to Mexico and the young pilot of the plane does not even take a drink "because he has to fly tomorrow." I am not sure if Mr. Reade read the same book that I did or if he has an alternative motive here but this was a great read - I could not put it down for three days and it made me want to get in my own plane and do my own x-country trip.

Not so much a story about 2 mid-teenagers flying from coast to coast across America, but more the story of strained relations between brothers and between father and sons. It took over 25 years for Rinker Buck to get all this organised in his head, then put it on paper, but it was worth waiting for. What we get is the straight story, from his point of view, of the preparations and the journey, the turnaround in relations between him and brother Kern, and the two of them dealing with the expectations of a larger-than-life father who, perhaps secretly, wished to relive fame through the exploits of his sons. Told against the backdrop of ariel incidents, we find that the ebullient schoolboy prankster has to take (literally) a back seat to his shy, reclusive older brother, who suddenly comes out of his shell. It never descends into maudlin, or goes over-the-top, it is a straight from the shoulder account of the trip and the souring and cementing of relationships - a damn fine read.

I bought this book because it was about flying. I got hooked because of how well it was written, and the delightful and engaging portrait of relationships between father and sons (and between brothers). I couldn't decide what I was enjoying the most, the parts about flying or the parts about the boys effort to make sense of their struggle with their father and with themselves. It all blended so well. It really touched my heart. Thanks Rink.

Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage is a wonderful collection of passages devoted to the author's long standing quest to reconcile his relationship with a domineering, eccentric father through the vehicle of a cross country flight with his peculiar and trusting older brother Kernanhan. It is an oddessey - a wonderful tale of wanderlust, brotherly devotion, friendship and understanding told through the recollections and remembrances of a fifteen year old boy, oftentimes at odds with his demanding and powerful father.

The story is set in the mid-sixties, at a time when our country was still rattled by the Kennedy family tragedy, yet not so jaded as to lose interest in the story of two young men in an antique airplane reliving their father's barnstorming days (and repeated, worn out stories of Stearman men and waterbags) and living their own memories to tell stories to their sons someday in probably the same fashion!

Personally, I had much in comman with the author's brother, having attended the same schools, and entered the same profession. I also happen to own and fly a restored Piper Cub. But the magic of this book is it's ability to appeal to both flyers and non flyers alike. It reminds us that we live in a great and beautiful country. It has it's faults, as we all do, and like most families, we have our problems and miscommunications, unmet expectations and misunderstandings, but with experience and "letting go" we appreciate the love that has been bestowed upon us - maybe years later - but a gift nonetheless.

A beautiful story.

Flight of Passage
by Rinker Buck

Imagine trying to write a memoir about the defining event of your life thirty years after it happened. This was the challenge facing Rinker Buck in his book Flight of Passage. In 1966, Rinker, then 15 years old, and his older brother Kern, who was 17, flew a 85-hp Piper Cub to become the youngest aviators ever to fly from coast to coast. They bought the Cub for $300 and rebuilt it themselves in their father's barn in New Jersey.

The simplicity of their aircraft seems astounding today. The tiny two-seat Cub had no battery, no radio, no lights, and needed to be hand-propped to start. Its tubular metal frame was coated with doped Irish linen. The Cub was a link to the low and slow, seat-of-the-pants flying of the barnstorming era.

The boy's father, Tom Buck, was a flying legend. A barnstormer in the 1930s, he had trained British flyers for the Battle of Britain and had lost a leg after the war in an air crash. This seeming handicap didn't prevent him from flying stunt shows with a big AT-6 Texan warbird on weekends away from his job as a publisher. Being Tom Buck's sons meant that the boys were destined to become flamboyant flyers--16-year-old Kern soloed 16 times on his 16th birthday in four separate airplanes. It was Kern's idea that he and Rinker should fly the cub across the country, and he was the primary pilot on the adventure.

Rinker Buck tells a tale with great drama and the flying scenes are spellbinding. "There's no accounting for a young pilot as good as Kern was that morning in California. He was my father and Big Eddie Mahler, and all of the instructors and barnstormers back at our home strip, giving back all at once everything they had put into him over the years. Bonk he pulled out of the turn. Wham he crossed the controls, flying us sideways to bleed off speed. Slam he closed the throttle and then kicked in the last of his rudder and aileron to keep us in the sideways slip. All the while he was playing way over on the left side of the cockpit with the stick to hold us flat and nose-high in the slip, so the plane would be expended and have nothing left when we got over the runway." His ability to describe the technique and craft of stick and rudder flight brings forth the same emotion and awe usually reserved for the flying prose of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Flight of Passage is much more than a flying story. It is a coming of age piece that carefully examines the relationships between two very different brothers and their demanding and heroic father. The Buck brothers were in fact retracing a transcontinental route that Tom Buck had described to them so many times that it had become family legend. But the boys soon find that to survive the perils of their flight they must separate the harsh facts and reality from their father's romanticized fiction.

Rinker and Kern Buck were successful in their transcontinental adventure and for a brief time were celebrities. Both went on to be successful in their careers and we are fortunate that thirty years later, Rinker Buck decided to tell their story. The cliché is that you find a book so engaging and riveting that you can't put it down. With Flight of Passage, if you have any interest in flying and adventure, you'll be staying up late into the night to finish it.

Copyright 2009, Kevin Clemens (speedreaders.info)

Length:: 3:03 Mins

Flight of Passage is a Rite of Passage book that will interest a wide audience. Would you like it? Would it make a good gift? I'll tell you more in my video review. Frank Derfler, author of "A Glint in Time"

This is a fantastic book! I've read it twice and will most likely read it again. It has so many compelling elements that it can't be fully appreciated in one reading. I think that the sheer adventure in Kern and Rinker Buck's 1966 coast-to-coast flight is what really seized me. I am the same age as the Buck brothers and struck out on my own the very same week they made their flight. Their desire to have an adventure, prove something to their father and master a pursuit reserved for skilled adults hit home with me. The book is funny, touching and insightful about family relationships.

It is a great read and I, for one, am very grateful to Rinker Buck for putting this story down on paper all these years later.