The journey between the US and Sydney took just over three months, covered 18 countries and took in 38 towns and cities.

Mr Frith, his late wife, Virginia, and their children, Angela, aged 10, Stuart, eight, and Rowena, five, visited areas as varied as Ireland, Germany, France, Turkey, Tehran, Karachi and West Timor during the 1975 trip.

Mr Frith said he and his family had been living in Massachusetts and decided flying themselves might be the best way to get home.

"I guess it took about nine months of preparation to get the flight approvals and all of those sorts of things, but it all came off, and on August 1, 1975, we departed from a little airport in Massachusetts," he said.

"We didn't book ahead for hotels, we didn't book ahead for flying. The only time we had to do that was in those days you had to get flight approvals flying over Indonesia, for example, and also Burma."

Mr Frith said some of his most distinct memories included flying close to the tips of icebergs near Greenland, flying over the vast Iranian desert, and avoiding a line of thunderstorms en route to Jakarta.

He said the family had also been in Timor when five Australian journalists - the Balibo Five - were killed.

"There were some issues that we had to be very careful about; flying through thunderstorms and things of that nature, and the politics of the situation of the time," Mr Frith said.

"We couldn't go through the Middle East because of the war at the time between Israel and Egypt so we had to go around through Turkey and down through Tehran.

"It was a good experience for the family; it was a good experience for the kids."

In 2011, Mr Frith released a book based on the trip, called Virginia's Diary, which documents the family's experiences in undertaking what he believes to be the only trip of its kind by a family in a six-seater, single-engine Cessna.