Wrong Way Corrigan, the Curtiss Robin, and the Twenty-Eight Hour Mistake That Flew From Brooklyn to Dublin

In July 1938, a broke California mechanic named Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn supposedly bound for California, flew 28 hours across the open North Atlantic instead, and landed in Dublin, Ireland. He blamed a faulty compass and insisted, for the rest of his life, that he never meant to go. Almost nobody believed him - and that is exactly why the world remembers him as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

Who Was Douglas Corrigan?

To understand the flight, you have to start at the beginning. In 1927, a skinny twenty-year-old Corrigan was working as a mechanic at Ryan Airlines in San Diego, California - a small aircraft builder operating out of a converted fish cannery on the waterfront.

That spring, Ryan took a contract from a then-unknown airmail pilot who wanted a custom monoplane built to cross the Atlantic alone and nonstop, New York to Paris. The pilot was Charles Lindbergh. The airplane was the Spirit of St. Louis.

Corrigan helped build it with his own hands - working on the wing and helping install the instrument panel. On the morning the aircraft rolled out to make history, it was Corrigan who pulled the chocks out from under the wheels. Standing at the creation of the most famous flight of the age lit a fire in him that never went out. He decided he would do it too.

The Airplane: A $310 Curtiss Robin

Through the 1930s, Corrigan barnstormed, wing-walked, and worked as a mechanic wherever he could during the Depression. In 1933, he bought a used Curtiss Robin for about $310.

The Robin was a high-wing cabin monoplane from 1929 - boxy, slow, and honest, built for puttering around the countryside on a Sunday. It was never designed to cross an ocean. In Corrigan’s own terms, it was the aviation equivalent of a used pickup truck with a couple hundred thousand miles on it.

He spent five years rebuilding it in his spare time with scrounged and secondhand parts. He pulled the original engine and installed a Wright Whirlwind - the same family of engine that carried Lindbergh to Paris - and packed the tiny cabin with extra fuel tanks until there was barely room to breathe.

Those tanks blocked the windshield entirely. Corrigan couldn’t see straight ahead from the pilot’s seat. On the ground he taxied in S-turns to see around the nose, and in level flight he navigated by leaning to a small side window.

The Government Said No

Corrigan wanted the Atlantic, so he applied for permission from the Bureau of Air Commerce, the federal predecessor to the FAA. They refused. They ruled the aircraft not airworthy for a transatlantic flight - the fuel tanks weren’t safe and the airframe wouldn’t survive the crossing.

As a consolation, they certified the Robin for cross-country flights over land within the United States. He could fly it around the country; he just couldn’t point it at the ocean.

For the next couple of years he did exactly that, repeatedly reapplying for Atlantic permission and repeatedly getting turned down. By 1938, the patched-and-repatched fabric made the airplane look like a flying quilt.

The “Wrong Way” Flight to Ireland

In July 1938, Corrigan flew the Robin from Long Beach, California to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York - roughly 27 hours of flying, a feat in itself. He announced he’d rest up and then fly back home to California.

On the foggy morning of July 17, 1938, his fuel-heavy Robin used nearly the entire runway to stagger into the air and climbed into the low cloud deck. Everyone on the ground noticed something odd: a pilot bound for California should turn west, but the last anyone saw, the little Robin was heading east - out over the Atlantic.

Twenty-eight hours later, the Robin came down out of the sky over Baldonnel Aerodrome near Dublin, Ireland, nearly out of fuel. Corrigan climbed out, grease-covered and grinning, and reportedly asked the astonished ground crew, “Just got in from New York. Where am I?” Told he was in Ireland, he replied that he had intended to fly to California.

His explanation: his compass had malfunctioned. Flying blind in cloud and fog, he’d followed the needle - and, he claimed, followed the wrong end of it the whole way across.

The Real Airmanship Behind the Joke

Whatever the truth of the compass story, the flight itself was extraordinary. Corrigan crossed the open North Atlantic alone, with no usable radio, unable to see forward, navigating by his compass, the water, and the stars through a side window. It got cold enough at altitude that ice formed inside the cabin.

Partway across, his feet got wet: a fuel tank was leaking, and gasoline was pooling in the cabin floor near a hot radial exhaust stack. One spark over the middle of the ocean would have ended it.

His fix was pure improvisation. He took a screwdriver and punched a hole in the floor on the side away from the hot exhaust, letting the gasoline drain out into the slipstream. That is airmanship they don’t hand out certificates for.

Why Nobody Believed Him - and Why It Didn’t Matter

No one bought the compass story - not the Irish, not the Americans, not the press. Everyone had watched him spend five years building an ocean-crossing airplane and getting told no. The consensus was obvious: if they wouldn’t let him fly the Atlantic legally, he’d fly it “by mistake.”

The authorities suspended his pilot certificate - for two weeks. By the time he and the airplane returned home by steamship, the suspension had already expired. He stepped off the boat a fully licensed pilot again, and a national hero.

The timing was everything. In a country still climbing out of the Depression, here was a cheerful, stubborn, broke young mechanic who took a $310 junker and thumbed his nose at the U.S. government - and got away with it with a grin. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade down Broadway before crowds reported to rival those for kings and presidents.

The Legend He Never Broke

Douglas Corrigan lived to 88 and died in 1995. For 57 years, every reporter, historian, and curious kid got the same answer: his compass went wrong, and he’d meant to go to California. He never once admitted otherwise. He even titled his memoir “That’s My Story.”

He knew, and the world knew - and he took the truth with him, because the legend was better than the fact. The same stubborn, joyful refusal to be told a dream “isn’t airworthy” is the spirit behind every homebuilt airplane in every hangar in America.

Key Takeaways

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan flew a modified Curtiss Robin from Brooklyn to Dublin over 28 hours in July 1938, claiming a compass error sent him the wrong way.
He bought the 1929 Curtiss Robin for about $310 and spent five years rebuilding it with a Wright Whirlwind engine and cabin fuel tanks that blocked his forward view.
The Bureau of Air Commerce had denied him permission for a transatlantic flight, certifying the aircraft only for domestic cross-country trips.
Authorities suspended his license for just two weeks, and he returned home a national hero with a Broadway ticker-tape parade.
As a young mechanic at Ryan Airlines, Corrigan helped build Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and pulled its chocks in 1927 - the inspiration for his own Atlantic obsession.