Wrong Way Corrigan

Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan (1907– 1995)

Douglas Corrigan, a brash, errant aviator, captured the imagination of a Depression-weary public in 1938 when he took off from Brooklyn on a nonstop solo flight to Los Angeles and landed his improbable airplane in Dublin a day later., thus earning him the nickname of Wrong Way Corrigan.

The few people who were at Floyd Bennett Field when Mr. Corrigan took off at 5:15 on the morning of July 17, 1938, were baffled when the 31-year-old aviator turned into a cloud bank and disappeared to the east.

According to his flight plan, he should have been heading west. 

Corrigan was a trained aircraft mechanic and pilot, (he helped build Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis) He had also made modifications to his own plane for transatlantic flight.

As the world learned when his jerry-built, overloaded secondhand airplane touched down at Dublin's Baldonnel Airport 28 hours and 13 minutes later, Mr. Corrigan had not only known what he was doing, he had also flown straight into the hearts of the American people.

"I'm Douglas Corrigan," he told a group of startled Irish airport workers who gathered around him when he landed. "Just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California." 

Although he continued to claim with a more or less straight face that he had simply made a wrong turn and been led astray by a faulty compass, the story was far from convincing, especially to the American aviation authorities who had rejected his repeated requests to make just such a flight because his modified 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane was judged unworthy of more than an experimental aircraft certification.

Unmoved by evidence that he had not checked weather reports for the North Atlantic before his flight and had carried charts showing only his supposedly planned route to California, the authorities deemed his plane so unsafe and his flight so illegal that it took a 600-word official telegram to detail all the regulations he had violated.

But if Mr. Corrigan had such a twinkle in his eye when he told his story that he appeared to be trying to suppress a wink, the authorities had trouble stifling a wink of their own.

Although his pilot's license was instantly suspended, Mr. Corrigan, who returned to the United States by ship, did not miss a minute of flying time. He served the entire suspension at sea. The license was reinstated as soon as he and his crated-up plane sailed into New York Harbor aboard the liner Manhattan on Aug. 4, and received a tumultuous greeting.

There was an even larger welcome the next day when an estimated one million New Yorkers lined lower Broadway for a ticker-tape parade that eclipsed the one given for Charles A. Lindbergh after his solo flight to Paris in 1927.

Mr. Corrigan's 3,150-mile flight was an immediate sensation, pushing depressing economic news and grim international reports aside on the front pages of American newspapers and dominating radio broadcasts across the country. 

Wrong Way never publicly admitted to intentionally flying to Ireland.