Ireland

Remembering ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan

Douglas 'Wrong Way' Corrigan 
Douglas 'Wrong Way' Corrigan  Douglas 'Wrong Way' Corrigan 

On this day in 1938, a Texan aviator named Douglas Corrigan began an ill-advised flight from New York to Dublin.

Corrigan touched down in New York in early July 1938, having flown from California. His plane was in such poor condition – leaking fuel had filled the cockpit with fumes – that he received national press attention just for surviving the journey.

Nevertheless he applied to undertake a transatlantic flight upon his arrival in New York. This was swiftly denied by the authorities, who deemed it suicidal.

However, Corrigan was allowed to return to the US west coast. He set off from Floyd Bennett field in Brooklyn on July 17 1938, ostensibly headed west to Long Beach, California.

He took off with few supplies, carrying only a litre of water, two boxes of fig bars and a couple of chocolate bars.

The few that turned out to see him off were confused to see him turn into a cloud bank and disappear to the east soon after take off.

The plane’s fuel problems continued during his trip, as fuel leaked over the floor of the cockpit, dangerously close to the hot exhaust.

Eventually he was forced to punch a hole in the floor with a screwdriver to avoid an explosion.

After 28 hours in the air he touched down at Dublin’ Baldonnel Airport and said to the startled staff,

“Just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California.”

He claimed that he his compass had malfunctioned and that after around 26 hours he realised he had been reading it backwards. This dubious excuse earned him the nickname ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan.

A journalist, H.R. Knickerbocker, looked over the ramshackle plane in Dublin and said that he marvelled that “anyone should have been rash enough to go in the air with it, much less try to fly the Atlantic.”

“The nose of the engine hood was a mass of patches soldered by Corrigan himself into a crazy-quilt design,” said Knickerbocker.

“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 while landing."

The authorities deemed his flight so unsafe and illegal that it took 600 words just to recount all the regulations he violated. He was suspended from flying for 14 days, most of which he spent returning to New York by sea.

He returned to America as a celebrity and was greeted by an estimated one million New Yorkers and a ticker tape parade on Broadway.

Corrigan made the most of his fame, endorsing ‘wrong way’ products like a watch that ran backwards and playing himself in ‘The Flying Irishman,’ a movie made about his flight. He died in 1995, at the age of 88.