Wrong Way Corrigan, the Curtiss Robin, and the Transatlantic Flight Nobody Was Supposed to Know About

On July 17, 1938, a young mechanic-turned-pilot named Douglas Corrigan departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York in a battered 1929 Curtiss Robin stuffed with fuel tanks, filed a flight plan for Los Angeles, and landed in Dublin, Ireland - 28 hours and 13 minutes later. He said he went the wrong way. The Civil Aeronautics Authority suspended his license for 14 days. A million people gave him a ticker-tape parade.

Who Was Douglas Corrigan?

Douglas Corrigan was born in 1907 in Galveston, Texas and grew up in California. He took his first flying lesson at 18 and showed an early talent for engines and mechanical systems. By his mid-twenties, he had landed a job at Ryan Airlines in San Diego in the spring of 1927 - the shop where Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was being built under a grinding, around-the-clock schedule.

Corrigan worked on the Spirit of St. Louis fuel system. He put his hands on the tanks, lines, and fittings of the airplane that would change aviation history. When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget in Paris on May 21, 1927 - 33 and a half hours after departing New York, covering roughly 3,600 miles of North Atlantic - Corrigan felt it differently than most. He had built that machine. From that point forward, he had one goal: fly the Atlantic himself.

The Airplane: A 1929 Curtiss Robin Rebuilt for Distance

Around 1930, Corrigan purchased a used Curtiss Robin for just over $300. The Robin had been a popular three-place, high-wing monoplane in its day - the workhouse of barnstormers and small charter operators. The one he bought had seen some years.

He replaced the original engine with a Wright Whirlwind radial, rebuilt the airframe where it needed it, and then systematically eliminated the rear seats to make room for fuel tanks. He engineered additional tanks into the fuselage structure - anywhere a cubic inch of volume could hold fuel. When finished, the airplane carried over 300 gallons. The cabin smelled like a refinery. There was barely room for the pilot in the cockpit. But the range numbers worked.

Three Rejections from the Civil Aeronautics Authority

Corrigan applied for a transatlantic crossing permit three times - in 1935, 1937, and 1938. The Civil Aeronautics Authority denied him each time. The objections were specific: the fuel system construction did not meet oceanic crossing standards, the compass card was cracked and unreliable, and the aircraft overall did not add up to what the authority needed to see on paper for a North Atlantic flight.

The objections were not entirely unreasonable. The CAA was looking at a canvas-covered airplane packed with amateur fuel system engineering, a degraded compass, and no radio. But Corrigan had done the math. The airplane would get there. Three times, the answer came back the same.

How He Built a Legal Defense Before the Flight

In the summer of 1938, Corrigan flew the Robin cross-country from California to New York - partly to demonstrate the airplane’s capability, partly to get himself into position. When the time came to return, he filed for authorization to fly west to Los Angeles. Officials at Floyd Bennett Field looked at the paperwork and signed off on a domestic westbound flight plan.

The same airplane the CAA had deemed unairworthy for an oceanic crossing was, by that same authority, approved for domestic cross-country operations. He now had a legal authorization to depart Floyd Bennett Field. What happened next was, officially, the compass’s fault.

The Flight: New York to Dublin, July 17, 1938

At 5:17 AM on July 17, 1938, Corrigan pushed the throttle forward and rolled into thick summer fog over Jamaica Bay. The Robin was at maximum weight. Visibility was near zero. He climbed through the overcast, broke out on top, and set a compass heading - he said, for California.

He carried a peanut butter sandwich, a box of fig bars, and a quart of water. There was a slow drip from a fuel line fitting that had been landing on his left boot since the preflight. There was no radio, no navigation aids, nothing electronic talking to the outside world. He navigated by dead reckoning alone: compass, airspeed indicator, and fuel gauges working their way down through the numbers.

He flew over the North Atlantic - sometimes low over the water under a gray ceiling, sometimes on top in clear air. Then, somewhere well into the flight, the sun appeared on the horizon ahead of him. Rising in the east. If he had been flying west toward California, it should have been rising behind him.

He let down through clouds over green fields and an unfamiliar coastline and found Baldonnel Aerodrome, southwest of Dublin. He landed on the grass, shut down the engine, and climbed out. He told the Irish mechanics who came running that he had flown in from New York. He asked where he was. When they told him Dublin, Ireland, he reportedly said: “I flew the wrong way.”

The Investigation and the 14-Day Suspension

The Civil Aeronautics Authority examined the aircraft. The compass card was, in fact, cracked and unreliable. Under the documented conditions - genuine fog on departure, no radio, no navigation aids - it was technically possible for a pilot to misread it. There was no definitive evidence the flight had been intentional. He had filed a legal flight plan for Los Angeles. He had followed his compass, he said, and it had led him east.

They suspended his pilot’s license for 14 days.

That suspension is its own footnote in regulatory history. He had never lied about anything that could be proved. He had filed the right flight plan. He had built a wall of technical defensibility that was paper-thin but legally sufficient, and he stood behind it.

The Reception: More Than a Million People

With his license suspended, Corrigan booked passage on the SS Manhattan and crossed the Atlantic the conventional way. What waited for him in New York was something no one had anticipated.

Contemporary reports put the crowd at more than a million people lining the streets of Manhattan for his ticker-tape parade - by multiple accounts exceeding the reception Lindbergh had received 11 years earlier. For a man who said he got lost. The country had decided that this particular navigational error was the most charming thing to happen to American aviation in years.

The following year he made a film, The Flying Irishman, and toured the airshow circuit. For decades after, everywhere he went, people asked the same question: Did you do it on purpose?

He always gave the same answer. He had simply followed his compass.

The Question He Never Answered

Douglas Corrigan died in December 1995, at 88 years old, in Santa Ana, California, where he had spent his later years growing citrus in an orchard. He never varied his answer once across 57 years. Whatever the truth was, he took it with him.

His cracked compass card is now part of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s aviation collection.

Why This Story Still Matters to Pilots

The charm of the Corrigan story is well-documented. The legal ingenuity is less celebrated, but equally striking. What gets the least attention is the flying itself.

Corrigan had no autopilot, no weather avoidance, no satellite navigation. He flew from New York to Ireland through fog and open ocean, navigating by dead reckoning alone, and arrived within landing distance of a specific grass aerodrome outside a city he was never officially trying to reach. Whether intentional or not, that required genuine skill - the kind of unshakeable confidence in aircraft and instruments that defined that generation of pilots.

Modern cockpits have smoothed the hard edges off what Corrigan was doing. Glass panels, autopilots, GPS, approach guidance, a dozen systems talking to each other. Most of that technology is genuinely good. But there is something worth sitting with in the image of a man in a canvas airplane crammed with fuel tanks, with a drip on his boot and a peanut butter sandwich in his pocket, working the North Atlantic one dead reckoning check at a time.

Key Takeaways

• Douglas Corrigan flew a modified 1929 Curtiss Robin from New York to Dublin on July 17, 1938, covering the distance in 28 hours and 13 minutes, after officially filing a flight plan for Los Angeles.
• He had personally worked on the Spirit of St. Louis fuel system at Ryan Airlines in 1927, which gave him both the technical knowledge and the motivation to attempt his own transatlantic crossing.
• The Civil Aeronautics Authority denied his transatlantic permit applications in 1935, 1937, and 1938, citing an unsafe fuel system, a cracked compass card, and no radio.
• He obtained legal departure authorization by filing a domestic flight plan to Los Angeles, transforming any subsequent ocean crossing into an official navigational error rather than a regulatory violation.
• His license was suspended for only 14 days because the CAA could not prove intent; his Manhattan ticker-tape parade reportedly drew more than a million people, exceeding Lindbergh’s reception by contemporary accounts.