Douglas “Wrong-Way” Corrigan: 70 Years Later

By Gregory McNamee on History

Seventy years ago, at 5:15 in the morning on July 17, 1938, a 31-year-old aviator named Douglas Corrigan walked out onto the tarmac of an airfield in Brooklyn, New York, climbed into the cockpit of his plane, and made for the skies, bound for Los Angeles.

In those days, radar had yet to come into general use, although the British government would install a pioneering coastal-defense system later that year. Pilots radioed for instructions along the way, checking in from time to time but mostly relying on ground personnel only when cloud cover prevented them from seeing terra firma. Aviation was a decidedly seat-of-the-pants affair, sometimes dangerous and always unpredictable.

Even so, observers were more than a little surprised when Corrigan’s plane banked sharply to the east on takeoff and disappeared into a looming cloudbank over the Atlantic Ocean, the opposite direction of where he was supposed to be headed. They were even more surprised when reports came that, 28 hours and 13 minutes later, Corrigan had landed his little modified Curtiss-Robin monoplane at an airfield outside Dublin, Ireland, and amiably told the workers who gathered around him, “I just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California.”

Thus, instantly, thanks to some sharp reporter, was the nickname “Wrong-Way Corrigan” born. And thus, instantly, was the wayward pilot’s flying license suspended—but only for two weeks, a slap on the wrist that had everyone involved smiling.

Corrigan claimed that his little plane—a wreck that he had bought for $310 three years earlier and rebuilt, bolt by plank by piston, in a California cow pasture—had been betrayed by a faulty compass, and that he had absentmindedly wandered to Ireland without ever bothering to check the lay of the land below him.

He had landed in Brooklyn a week earlier, having made a solo run from California that, in the bargain, netted him a world record. Understandably puffed up at the accomplishment, he determined to try to break the established records across the Atlantic, set over the past few years by the likes of Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post in the wake of Charles Lindbergh’s famed 1927 transatlantic flight. Almost as soon as he landed in Brooklyn, he applied for permission to make a trip to Ireland.

The civil aviation authorities were quick to say no. All they had to do was take a quick look at Corrigan’s nearly homemade plane, its engine cobbled together from two previous planes and souped up to nearly double the original 90-horsepower rating. It was an accident waiting to happen. Corrigan had added five fuel tanks to the rig that completely blocked his view out the front of the cockpit, so that he had to open his door—held fast by baling wire, like many other parts of the plane—to see where he was going. California aviation authorities gave the 1929 monoplane an experimental certification, and their Brooklyn counterparts had no intention of improving the grade.

Corrigan was unfazed. In a decade-long career of barnstorming, he had applied for permission to cross the Atlantic several times. He had helped build Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, which now hangs proudly from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., assembling that famed aircraft’s wings and instrument panels; he had even pulled the chocks out from under its wheels as Lindbergh soared off to New York and glory. Corrigan knew what constituted a safe plane. He was a daredevil, but he was no fool.

On Corrigan’s last application, in 1935, the federal authorities had said that his plane was not worthy of an ocean crossing, but they didn’t blink about the craft’s suitability to cross over land. Corrigan had spent the next two years making modification after modification to increase his plane’s range and dependability, but still they turned him down.

He was careful not to pack a map of the Atlantic, but instead made sure to show off charts of the Midwest and California as he clambered aboard his supposedly westward-bound aircraft. He packed only a little food: a couple of chocolate bars, cookies, a quart of water. He headed into the clouds, only to reappear in Ireland the following afternoon, innocently asking for directions.

In the bargain, he set a new record, despite a leaky fuel line that made the crossing even more perilous than it already was. The American public winked along with Corrigan. He earned a tickertape parade, public appearances, a book deal, a movie contract, and a few celebrity endorsements, including one for a pocket watch that ran backward.

By the time World War II began, the commotion surrounding him had quieted, and Corrigan worked as a test pilot and freight transporter. He later bought an orange grove outside Los Angeles. He was all but forgotten afterward, and when he was invited to display his famed plane at an aircraft show in 1988, he grumbled that he would take him a lot of work to do so—for he had taken it apart and had been storing it in his garage since 1940.

Toward the end of his life, Douglas Corrigan is said to have admitted that his trip hadn’t been a wrong-way adventure after all. The story is unsubstantiated, and even in his last months—he died on December 9, 1995, at the age of 88—Corrigan never said anything other than that fog and a bad compass had been kind enough to give him a small measure of fame in his day.