Wrong Way Corrigan, the Curtiss Robin Full of Fuel Tanks Nobody Trusted, and the Compass Reading That Still Makes Pilots Smile

On July 18, 1938, a battered Curtiss Robin monoplane landed at Baldonnel Aerodrome outside Dublin, Ireland - 28 hours and 13 minutes after departing Brooklyn, New York. The pilot, Douglas Corrigan, climbed out smelling of fuel and fig juice, looked around at the Irish countryside, and explained that he must have flown the wrong way. Authorities were skeptical. Pilots have been smiling about it ever since.

Who Was Douglas Corrigan?

Douglas Grace Corrigan was born in Galveston, Texas, in January 1907. His father, a civil engineer, died while Douglas was still young, and his mother relocated the family to Los Angeles. Aviation took hold of him in his late teens in the specific way it takes hold of certain people - completely, and permanently.

By 1927, Corrigan had found work as a mechanic and riveter at Ryan Airlines in San Diego. He was twenty years old. Ryan was building a very specific airplane that year: the Spirit of St. Louis.

He Put Rivets in Lindbergh’s Airplane

Corrigan worked twelve-hour days on the aircraft that Charles Lindbergh would fly from New York to Paris. He worked on the fuselage, on the landing gear assembly, on the countless small tasks that turn blueprints and aluminum into a flying machine.

When Lindbergh climbed in and flew east toward New York and then on to Paris, Corrigan was standing on the ramp watching it go. The thought that has launched most of aviation history had just been planted: if that man can do it, I can do it. What separated them, in that moment, was money, backing, and a custom-built aircraft.

After 1927, Corrigan did what young pilots of that era did to stay airborne - barnstorming, crop dusting, ferrying aircraft for small operators. Work that kept him in the sky when the margins were thin and the airplanes were older than they should have been.

The Airplane Nobody Should Have Trusted

In 1933, Corrigan purchased a used 1929 Curtiss Robin monoplane for approximately $900 - real money during the Depression, and money he had been setting aside specifically for this purpose.

The Curtiss Robin was a practical, unremarkable high-wing three-seat cabin monoplane originally built for small mail routes and short regional hops. The one Corrigan bought had already lived a full life.

What he did to it over the next five years was either the most audacious modification in personal aviation history or the most elaborate act of wishful engineering. He added fuel tanks everywhere a tank could physically fit: under the floor, in the cabin, in the nose, in the wings. When finished, the Robin had a theoretical range of more than 4,000 miles - theoretical, because no one had tested whether the original airframe could sustain those loads.

The cockpit was now mostly tanks. Forward visibility - never exceptional in the original design - was partially blocked by the new equipment. The landing gear, original to the aircraft and visibly worn, had been reinforced with improvised solutions. The instruments were marginal. The compass was an older unit that had developed, through years of rough landings, what might charitably be called its own opinions about headings.

The CAA Said No. Three Times.

Corrigan took his modified Robin to the Civil Aeronautics Authority - the predecessor to today’s FAA - and applied for official permission to fly it from New York to Ireland. The inspector looked at the airplane. He looked at the fuel tanks obstructing the forward view. He looked at the landing gear. He looked at the compass. He said no.

Corrigan went away, worked on the aircraft for several more months, and came back. No. He came back again. No.

The CAA’s position was not unreasonable. The airframe carried legitimate structural questions at the loaded weights Corrigan intended to fly. The plan involved flying alone over open water for more than twenty hours with no radio contact, no weather support, and no rescue capability.

Douglas Corrigan simply disagreed with the conclusion.

The Flight Plan Said Los Angeles

In the summer of 1938, Corrigan flew the Robin from California to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York. Stated purpose: fly it home to California.

He filed a flight plan. The destination was Los Angeles.

On the morning of July 17, 1938, the sky over Brooklyn was gray with low cloud and limited visibility. He loaded every tank to capacity. The Robin sat low on its gear under the weight of all that aviation gasoline. Corrigan folded himself into the cockpit among the tanks, the five-cylinder Wright Whirlwind engine ticked over in the cool morning air, and the tower cleared him for departure.

The Robin used most of Floyd Bennett’s runway before the wings agreed to fly. The airplane staggered into the gray Brooklyn sky, cleared the boundary fence, and found the Atlantic air.

He turned east.

Twenty-Eight Hours Over the Atlantic

Corrigan’s account of the crossing describes the first hours in cloud cover and low visibility, the instruments behaving as they do on any long flight in weather, the engine running steadily. Then the fuel situation developed.

Sometime in the early hours of the flight, he noticed gasoline dripping onto his shoe. A tank seam was failing under sustained vibration, and raw fuel was making its way into the cockpit.

His solution: punch a hole in the cockpit floor with a screwdriver so the fuel could drain out the bottom of the airplane rather than pool around him and his running engine.

That response - calm, practical, and involving adding an additional hole to a structure already under stress - tells you something important about the kind of pilot Corrigan was.

Somewhere east of Newfoundland, he ate a chocolate bar. He had a container of water and some fig juice. That was the full provision list for a 28-hour oceanic crossing. He flew through cloud, through mid-Atlantic turbulence, through stretches where the ocean spread beneath him in every direction with nothing in it, then back into cloud. The engine ran. The compass sat on the panel. He held his heading.

After roughly twenty hours, he later said, he saw the ocean below through a break in the clouds and assumed he had gotten turned around - that he must be approaching the Pacific, running very late for Los Angeles.

Then green fields appeared.

“I Guess I Flew the Wrong Way”

Corrigan set down at Baldonnel Aerodrome, outside Dublin, on the morning of July 18, 1938 - 28 hours and 13 minutes after leaving Brooklyn.

The airfield officials who met the unexpected American aircraft had received no notice of its arrival, no flight plan filed to Ireland, no radio contact. They asked the pilot where he had come from.

“I just came from New York,” Corrigan said. Then: “I guess I flew the wrong way.”

The official response was a suspension of his pilot certificate for two weeks, retroactively dated to when the flight had already taken place. In practical terms, the punishment was entirely symbolic. He had served it over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Welcome Home

When Corrigan returned to New York by ship, the city gave him a ticker tape parade down Broadway. Crowds numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Some contemporary accounts describe the welcome as larger than the one Lindbergh had received eleven years earlier, though Corrigan himself was typically modest about that comparison. He had genuine respect for Lindbergh. He had, after all, put the rivets in the man’s airplane.

He wrote a memoir titled That’s My Story, published in 1938, in which he maintained throughout that the compass had been the problem.

Was It on Purpose?

Every pilot who hears this story eventually asks the same question.

Corrigan had spent five years modifying that specific airplane for exactly this crossing. He had applied for permission to make exactly this flight and been denied multiple times. He knew the Robin’s range to the gallon, because he had installed every tank and run every calculation himself. By 1938, he had logged hundreds of hours in that specific aircraft.

A magnetic compass - even an old and unreliable one - does not confuse east and west. The difference between flying toward California and flying toward Ireland is not a matter of a few degrees of drift. It is approximately 180 degrees of heading. A pilot with more than a decade of experience, who had personally selected and installed his own navigation equipment, flew 28 hours in precisely the opposite direction from his stated destination.

Corrigan always said it was an accident. He said so in 1938 and he was still saying it in 1995, the year he died at the age of 88. The story never changed.

Whether you believe him is a matter of personal judgment.

Why This Story Still Matters

The name stuck. For the fifty-seven remaining years of his life, Douglas Corrigan was Wrong Way Corrigan. He never escaped it, and he never appeared to want to.

The story endures because it reflects something true about the generation that built American aviation. Corrigan was not reckless in any ignorant sense. He understood the risks precisely - he knew the airplane’s limitations, had thought through the failure modes with the mind of a man who spent years in hangar culture working on other people’s aircraft.

He had simply decided the dream was worth it. If the authorities would not grant permission for what he had been building toward for eleven years, since the day he watched Lindbergh’s airplane climb out of the San Diego sky, he would find another way. And then, because he was Douglas Corrigan, he called it a navigation error and smiled.

The compass reading that still makes pilots smile is not the number on the instrument. It’s the deadpan delivery of a man who knew exactly where he was going.

Key Takeaways

• Douglas Corrigan (1907–1995) worked as a riveter on the Spirit of St. Louis at Ryan Airlines at age 20, before spending years building toward his own transatlantic attempt.
• He purchased a 1929 Curtiss Robin for approximately $900 in 1933 and spent five years adding fuel tanks to achieve a theoretical range of more than 4,000 miles.
• The Civil Aeronautics Authority denied his application to fly New York–Ireland multiple times on legitimate structural and instrument safety grounds.
• On July 17–18, 1938, he flew from Brooklyn to Dublin in 28 hours and 13 minutes under a flight plan filed to Los Angeles.
• His two-week pilot certificate suspension was retroactively dated - the punishment was served before it was issued.
• Corrigan maintained until his death in 1995 that a faulty compass was responsible; the name Wrong Way Corrigan followed him for the rest of his life.