Wrong Way Corrigan and the flight plan to California that ended in Ireland

Douglas Corrigan filed a flight plan from Brooklyn to Long Beach, California, on July 17, 1938. Twenty-eight hours and thirteen minutes later, he landed in Dublin, Ireland, completing an unauthorized nonstop transatlantic crossing in a 1929 Curtiss Robin monoplane. He claimed his compass malfunctioned. Nobody believed him. Nobody could prove otherwise.

Who Was Douglas Corrigan?

Corrigan was no amateur. He had worked as a mechanic at Ryan Airlines in San Diego, where he helped build Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. He riveted fuel tanks into the fuselage and watched the airplane take shape under his own hands. When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927, Corrigan decided he would do the same.

But Corrigan lacked Lindbergh’s wealthy backers and newspaper sponsors. What he had was a nine-year-old Curtiss Robin purchased for $310. The engine burned oil. The cabin leaked. A spare fuel tank he had welded in himself sat directly behind the instrument panel, blocking most of his forward visibility. The powerplant was a Wright J-6-5 — reliable, but hardly built for ocean crossings.

Why Did the Government Say No?

Corrigan applied to the Bureau of Air Commerce (the predecessor to the FAA) for permission to fly the Atlantic. They rejected him outright. The airplane was too old, too patched together, too dangerous for a transatlantic attempt. They refused to issue an airworthiness certificate for the crossing.

He applied again. Denied. Five times total, he requested permission. Five times, the answer was no.

What they did approve was a transcontinental round trip: Long Beach, California, to New York and back. Perfectly legal, perfectly routine. Corrigan accepted with a straight face.

The Flight From Brooklyn to Dublin

Corrigan flew from Long Beach to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn in just under twenty-eight hours — an impressive feat in that airplane. He landed, refueled, filed his return flight plan to California, and the next morning taxied onto the runway.

He took off heading east.

The weather was overcast with fog sitting on the deck. Ground observers watched the Curtiss Robin lift off in the wrong direction, but assumed he would circle back. He never did. The airplane disappeared into the clouds, and without radar, transponders, or flight following, no one on the ground had any way to track him.

Twenty-eight hours and thirteen minutes later, Corrigan touched down at Baldonnel Aerodrome in Dublin, Ireland. He had crossed the Atlantic Ocean nonstop in an uncertified, nine-year-old airplane.

“Where Am I? I Landed in the Wrong Place.”

When Corrigan climbed out of the cockpit, Irish ground crews stared at him. According to every contemporary account, his first words were: “Just got in from New York. Where am I? I landed in the wrong place.”

His explanation was simple. The compass malfunctioned. The clouds were too thick to see the ground. By the time he realized he was over ocean instead of countryside, he was too far along to turn back. He must have read the compass backward and flown east instead of west.

No one believed him. But no one could disprove it either. The compass was old and genuinely unreliable. The fog was real and well-documented. And once he vanished into that cloud deck, there was no record of his position until he appeared over Ireland.

The Lightest Punishment in Aviation History

The Bureau of Air Commerce suspended Corrigan’s pilot’s license for fourteen days — arguably the gentlest penalty ever issued for a flagrant flight plan violation and multiple regulatory breaches.

When he returned to New York, the city threw him a ticker-tape parade. An estimated one million people lined Broadway. The crowd was larger than the one that had greeted Lindbergh. Corrigan rode through the streets grinning, and from that day forward, the world knew him as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

He Never Broke Character

For the remaining fifty years of his life — Corrigan lived to be eighty-eight — he never once admitted the flight was intentional. Reporters pressed him. Interviewers tried to coax a wink or a confession. In 1938, in 1958, in 1978, the story remained identical: faulty compass, bad weather, honest error.

No pilot who has ever been genuinely lost has failed to notice flying over open ocean for twenty-eight hours. Corrigan knew exactly where he was going. He had built Lindbergh’s airplane with his own hands. He understood precisely what his Robin could do. The bureaucracy told him no five times, so he filed his flight plan to California and flew to Ireland.

What Happened to the Airplane?

Corrigan’s Curtiss Robin spent years parked at Orange County Airport in California, slowly deteriorating in the weather. Various restoration efforts have been mounted over the decades to preserve an airplane that represents a vanishing era of aviation — the homemade, baling-wire-and-determination flying that built the industry from nothing.

Key Takeaways

Douglas Corrigan flew nonstop from Brooklyn to Dublin on July 17, 1938, after being denied transatlantic permission five times
He made the crossing in a 1929 Curtiss Robin purchased for $310, with a self-welded auxiliary fuel tank blocking his forward view
His pilot’s license was suspended for just fourteen days, and New York gave him a ticker-tape parade drawing one million spectators
Corrigan maintained for the rest of his life that the flight was an accidental compass error — a claim universally disbelieved but never disproven
He had personally helped build the Spirit of St. Louis as a mechanic at Ryan Airlines, giving him firsthand knowledge of what a transatlantic airplane required