Robert N. Buck, 93; record-setting teenage flier, airline pilot, author
Robert N. Buck, a former Trans World Airlines pilot and aviation author who set flying records as a teenager in the 1930s and flew severe-weather research missions during World War II, has died. He was 93.
Buck, who died April 14 in a Berlin, Vt., hospital of complications from a fall, first took to the air as a 15-year-old glider pilot in New Jersey in 1929. A longtime resident of North Fayston, Vt., Buck flew until he was 88.
“He remembered staring out of the window in ninth grade and dreaming about flying; it was just the love of his life,” his daughter, Ferris Buck, said this week.
She said her father told her and her brother Rob, a retired Delta Airlines pilot, to never hold a formal “celebration of life” for him after he died.
“So we had a party for him at his house Sunday,” she said. “At the end of the party, some of the local pilots did a fly-by, and one young man did incredible stunts over the house.
“A retired pilot friend of mine said, ‘Whenever I saw your father, I was awestruck because he was one of the real aviators, and we just came later.’ ”
Born in Elizabethport, N.J., on Jan. 29, 1914, Buck grew up in nearby Westfield. At the age of 15, he and a fellow high school student built and flew their own glider, which was towed by a Model A Ford at a tiny local grass airstrip.
In April 1930, the 16-year-old Buck passed the test for a private pilot’s license. Three months later, he set a 15,000-foot junior altitude record.
And at Newark Airport on Sept. 29, 1930, equipped with six chocolate bars and a canteen, he climbed into his Pitcairn Mailwing, an open-cockpit biplane, and took off for Los Angeles, determined to break the junior transcontinental airspeed record.
He did -- by one hour and eight minutes.
The seven-stop flight, according to a contemporary Associated Press account, ended at 10:28 a.m. on Oct. 4 after a total flying time of 28 hours and 33 minutes. Buck set another junior record on his return trip to Newark: 23 hours and 47 minutes, according to his log book.
He told the story of his early days as a pilot in his first book, “Burning Up the Sky,” published in 1931 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Dubbed “The Schoolboy Pilot” in the press, the red-haired young biplane pilot in the leather helmet and goggles made more than a dozen junior record-breaking flights, although accounts vary on his precise flight times.
That included a flight from Newark to Havana in 1931 in 14 hours and 47 minutes, according to the family. (He and his parents later met with President Herbert Hoover at the White House, where Buck presented Hoover with a foot-long Cuban cigar.)
In the wake of famed pilot Jimmy Doolittle’s senior record flight to Mexico City, Buck established a Newark-to-Mexico City junior record in 1932 of 24 hours and nine minutes, according to a Times account.
In 1936, at the age of 22, Buck established a nonstop long-distance record in a straight flight from Burbank to Columbus, Ohio.
The next year, he joined TWA (then Transcontinental and Western Air) as a co-pilot. He rose to captain three years later.
“When I was a young captain -- and I looked young -- some lady said to the hostess, ‘Is that the co-pilot?’ And she said, “No, that’s the captain.’ And she got off the airplane at Pittsburgh,” Buck recalled in a 2002 interview with National Public Radio.
As a civilian pilot for the Air Transport Command during World War II, Buck flew personnel and materiel to the African and European theaters.
When TWA was awarded an Army Air Forces project to research weather during the war, Buck served as project pilot and manager, flying a B-17 from Alaska to Brazil to investigate radio interference from static caused by precipitation, including rain and snow.
“I was able to put my nose in any kind of weather I wanted to fly through,” he said in the National Public Radio interview. “We’d sit around, waiting until the weather was bad and then go fly through it.”
For his research, he became one of the few civilians to be awarded the Air Medal.
Buck was named TWA’s chief pilot -- then called superintendent of flying -- in 1945 and was command captain in the delivery of TWA’s first Lockheed Constellation, the then-modern pressurized, four-engine, high-speed transport. But he preferred flying to administrative work and soon returned to piloting.
That included flying a DC-3 with actor Tyrone Power on a 20th Century Fox publicity trip through South America, Africa and Europe. Power, who had been a Marine C-46 Transport pilot during the war, did a majority of the flying and became a close friend of Buck.
Buck, who served on weather and air safety committees for what became NASA, won the Air Line Pilots Assn. Air Safety Award in 1963. He also served on the FAA’s Supersonic Transport Committee.
In 1965, flying a Boeing 707 in shifts with several other pilots, he went around the world in a route that covered both poles. In 1970, he inaugurated TWA’s New York-to-London and New York-to-Paris 747 service.
He retired from TWA in 1974 at the age of 60, as required by law. But he continued to fly general aviation aircraft, including sailplanes.
Buck’s 1970 book “Weather Flying,” which is still in print, is considered must-reading for pilots. He also wrote “Flying Know-How,” “The Art of Flying,” “The Pilot’s Burden: Flying Safely and the Roots of Pilot Error” and “North Star Over My Shoulder,” his 2002 memoir.
Buck’s wife of 66 years, Jean, died in 2004, but he continued to live independently, his daughter said.
“The night before he fell down, he made dinner for my husband and me -- beef brisket and homemade pumpkin pie,” she said. “He did all his own mowing and cooking. He really was a remarkable man.”
In addition to his son and daughter, Buck is survived by eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.