Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck is a solid book, and the first from the writer of The Oregon Trail and Life on the Mississippi. Published in 1997, it chronicles the flight across the U.S. done by 15-year-old Rinker and his 17-year-old brother Kern Buck, a trip many reporters said was the youngest cross-country trip flown.
Kern was the primary pilot and Rinker the navigator and they in 1996 flew an 85-horsepower Piper Cub from New Jersey to California without a radio. The week-long trip went through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before they reached their Orange County destination and the boys' Uncle Jimmy who lived there.It's an interesting read about the journey, done with the encouragement of their father Tom Buck, a barnstorming air-show pilot for decades who lost a leg in a plane crash before the birth of the brothers. The book includes great content on the trip, the confidence that grew in the boys through it, including from flying the Guadalupe Pass through the Rockies, and the characters met along the way. It's a really good tale of a time in America and the completion of a fairly herculean task. Buck also details well the dynamic between he and Kern and how they interacted with their larger-than-life father.