Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan flies across the Atlantic - July 17th, 1938

On this day in 1938, American aviator Douglas Corrigan began his “wrong way” flight from New York to Ireland.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that soars its way through history one day at
a time. I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're talking about
the errant pilot who lifted the spirits of Depression era

(00:22):
Americans by flying three thousand miles to Europe, supposedly by mistake.
The day was July seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight. American aviator
Douglas Corrigan began his wrong way flight from New York

(00:43):
to Ireland. According to his approved flight plan, the pilot
was supposed to take off from Brooklyn and fly directly
to Long Beach, California, but because of what he later
called a navigational error, Corrigan wound up flying all the
way to Dublin instead. This accidental transatlantic flight earned him

(01:05):
the nickname Wrong Way Corrigan, but is just about everyone
suspected Corrigan's wrong turn was one hundred percent on purpose.
Douglas Corrigan was born in Galveston, Texas, on January twenty second,
nineteen oh seven. He fell in love with flying at
an early age and went on to earn his pilot's

(01:28):
license when he was just nineteen years old. In the
decade that followed, he worked a number of jobs in aviation,
including as an aircraft mechanic for the Ryan Aeronautical Company
in San Diego. Corrigan also assisted in building Charles Lindbergh's
famous plane, the Spirit of Saint Louis. Like many other pilots,

(01:50):
Corrigan was inspired by linn Bergh's historic flight from New
York to Paris in nineteen twenty seven. It was the
first solo non stop trans atlantic flight in history and
was considered a modern miracle at the time. Itching to
prove himself and hoping to become an overnight celebrity like
his idol, Corrigan began planning his own transatlantic crossing, and

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because he was of Irish descent, he chose Ireland as
his destination. The only problem was the aspiring pilot had
no money and at the time no plane, So Corrigan
bided his time and saved his pennies, and in nineteen
thirty three he was able to salvage a nineteen twenty
nine Curtis Robin airplane that had been on its way

(02:36):
to the scrap heap. He spent the next several years
rebuilding and modifying the plane for long distance travel. Then,
in nineteen thirty five, he requested permission from the Bureau
of Air Commerce to fly from New York to Ireland.
The application was swiftly denied, as Corrigan's ramshackle single engine

(02:58):
plane was deemed unairworthy for a transatlantic flight. Undeterred, the
pilot continued to tinker with his plane, boosting the engine
and adding extra fuel tanks. Still, despite his best efforts,
all of his later applications were rejected as well. In
those days, it was illegal for an American pilot to

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fly across the Atlantic without first obtaining a permit from
the Bureau, But since that clearly wasn't in the cards
for Corrigan, the brash pilot decided to take a different course.
In July of nineteen thirty eight, eleven years after Lindbergh's crossing,
Corrigan flew his plane called Sunshine, from California to New York.

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This cross country flight wasn't newsworthy in itself, but because
the Sunshine was in such sorry shape, the national press
covered it anyway out of sheer amazement that Corrigan's plane
had survived the trip. Shortly after landing in New York,
Corrigan once again sought permission for a transatlantic crossing. He

(04:01):
was promptly refused, but was allowed to schedule a return
flight to the West Coast, even though his plane probably
should have been grounded for safety violations, and so at
five point fifteen in the morning on July seventeenth, nineteen
thirty eight, Douglas Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field
in Brooklyn, ostensibly bound for California. However, a few minutes

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into the flight, he inexplicably turned east and then disappeared
into a cloud bank. Authorities feared the worst when the
plane failed to land in California, but then twenty eight
hours after his departure, Corrigan touched down in Dublin, safe
and sound. He claimed to have lost his way in
the heavy clouds and then never found it again because

(04:49):
of his malfunctioning compass, only noticing his mistake after about
twenty six hours of flying the wrong way. As unbelievable
as his cover story was, the most amazing thing was
that he had survived the journey at all. His only
provisions were two chocolate bars, a couple boxes of fig
bar cookies, and two dozen gallons of water. There was

(05:12):
no radio, and no parachute on board. If that weren't
bad enough, a post flight inspection of the plane revealed
more than sixty violations, including leaky fuel pipes. Corrigan later
said the tanks had been leaking so badly that at
one point he had to cut a hole in the
floor to drain out all the gas that had pooled

(05:34):
in the cockpit. Thankfully, he had at least brought a
screwdriver along, otherwise he likely would have passed out from
the fumes or perhaps even exploded mid air. Journalist HR
Knickerbocker examined the plane himself in Dublin and concluded that
Corrigan was lucky to be alive. As I looked over

(05:55):
it at the Dublin Aerodrome, he wrote, I really marveled
that anyone should have been rash enough even to go
in the air with it, much less try to fly
the Atlantic. He built it, or rebuilt it, practically as
a boy would build a scooter out of a soapbox
and a pair of old roller skates. The nose of
the engine hood was a mass of patches soldered by

(06:18):
Corrigan himself into a crazy quilt design. The door, behind
which Corrigan crouched for twenty eight hours, was fastened together
with a piece of baling wire, and the reserve gasoline
tanks put together by Corrigan left him so little room
that he had to sit hunched forward, with his knees
cramped and not enough window space to see the ground

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when landing. As you might imagine, aviation authorities didn't believe
that Corrigan had flown to Ireland by mistake. After all,
he had brought along more than three hundred gallons of gas,
and even with his limited visibility, he must have noticed
that he was flying over open ocean on what was
meant to be a transcontinental flight. In light of this,

(07:04):
Corrigan's pilot's license was immediately suspended, though only for a
couple weeks. By the time the grounded pilot and his
creded airplane arrived back in the US by boat, the
suspension had already been lifted. Upon his return to New York,
the pilot, now dubbed Wrong Way Corrigan by the press,

(07:25):
was treated to a hero's welcome. The New York Post
celebrated his return by printing a giant backwards headline declaring,
Hail Wrong Way Corrigan. The city also threw a Lavish
Ticker Tate parade in his honor, and with roughly a
million people in attendance, the crowd was said to be
much larger than the one at Charles Lindbergh's parade. Corrigan

(07:48):
stuck to his story for the public's amusement, but he
did give several cheeky interviews in which he admitted his
mistake while grinning and winking at the camera. Having final
won the fame he had craved for more than a decade,
Corrigan made the most of his fifteen minutes. He quickly
penned a memoir titled That's My Story, which was published

(08:10):
in time for holiday shopping later that same year. He
also endorsed a string of wrong way products, such as
a wristwatch that ran backwards. In the following year, he
played himself in a Hollywood adaptation of his life story
called The Flying Irishman. Corrigan retired from aviation in nineteen

(08:31):
fifty and lived the rest of his life on an
orange grove in California with his wife and three sons.
He passed away on December ninth, nineteen ninety five, having
maintained to the end of his life that his flight
to Ireland had been completely unintentional. I'm gay, Blues gay,

(08:52):
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep
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way by writing to this Day at iHeartMedia dot com.

(09:14):
Thanks to Casby Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in history class.