Wrong Way Corrigan, the Curtiss Robin That Flew to Ireland by 'Mistake,' and the Twenty-Eight Hours That Made Him a Folk Hero

On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn, New York, on a flight plan bound for California - and landed 28 hours later in Ireland. He insisted he had simply misread his compass. Almost no one believed him, and the “mistake” turned a broke ex-mechanic into one of the most beloved folk heroes in American aviation history.

Who Was Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan?

Douglas Corrigan was a young aircraft mechanic who became famous overnight for a supposedly accidental transatlantic flight. The press dubbed him “Wrong Way” Corrigan, and the nickname stuck for the rest of his life.

His story begins in 1927 at Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego, where a quiet, skilled 20-year-old Corrigan was part of the team building an airplane for an unknown mail pilot named Charles Lindbergh. That airplane was the Spirit of St. Louis.

Corrigan helped assemble the wing, installed the instrument panel, and pulled the chocks the day Lindbergh flew out of San Diego on the journey that would end over Paris. Watching Lindbergh become the most famous man on Earth lit an ambition in Corrigan that never faded: he was going to fly the Atlantic alone, too.

The Airplane He Built to Cross an Ocean

No one was going to hand Corrigan an airplane, so he bought his own. In 1933, he paid about $310 for a used Curtiss Robin - a high-wing cabin monoplane from the late 1920s. It was already four years old and tired when he got it.

Being a mechanic, Corrigan rebuilt the airplane himself in his spare time. He pulled the original engine and hung a larger Wright Whirlwind on the nose, then kept adding cylinders over the years until the little Robin produced more than double its original factory horsepower.

He also packed the cabin with extra fuel tanks - including where a passenger would normally sit. The tanks were so large that once he sat down, he could not see straight ahead. To see forward, he had to look out the side windows, use a small periscope, or bank the airplane and peek. He built an aircraft he couldn’t see out of, on purpose, because every gallon of fuel meant another mile toward Ireland.

Why the Authorities Refused His Atlantic Flight

Corrigan tried to do it by the book. He formally applied for permission to fly nonstop from New York to Ireland - and regulators turned him down flat. To them, the Robin was a homebuilt patchwork with fuel tanks blocking the windshield and instruments “held together with baling wire.”

They granted him an experimental license but refused to clear the airplane for an ocean crossing, considering it a death sentence. As a compromise, Corrigan requested and received permission for a coast-to-coast flight instead.

In the summer of 1938, he flew the Robin from Long Beach, California, to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York - a grueling 27-hour cross-country in a small airplane with its windshield full of fuel tanks. It was a genuine feat in its own right, though history barely remembers it.

The Flight That Made Him a Legend

On the morning of July 17, 1938, the weather over Floyd Bennett Field was low, gray, and heavy. Corrigan had filed a flight plan to return west to California. He fired up the Wright engine and rolled out carrying roughly 1,100 pounds of gasoline - far more than the little airplane had any business hauling.

He used nearly the entire runway to stagger into the air, climbed into the overcast, and made a big, slow turn - to the east, out toward the ocean. An official watching from the ground assumed he was simply coming around to get on course for California. Corrigan never turned back. The Robin vanished into the clouds heading the wrong way.

For the next 28 hours, no one on Earth knew where Douglas Corrigan was. He had no radio - no way to call anyone and no way for anyone to reach him.

A Fuel Leak Fixed With a Screwdriver

A couple of hours out, Corrigan discovered that one of the cabin tanks was leaking. Gasoline was pooling on the floorboards and running toward the back of the cabin - toward the hot exhaust pipe.

He didn’t panic. He took a screwdriver and punched a hole through the floor of the airplane on the side opposite the exhaust, so the leaking fuel would drain out into the slipstream and away from any ignition source. He fixed a fuel leak thousands of feet over the North Atlantic with a screwdriver and a hole in the floor.

The “Backwards Compass” Story

Corrigan flew with two compasses. One was a decent unit mounted on top of the panel; the other was a 20-year-old instrument mounted down on the cockpit floor. His explanation was that, in the dark, he had followed the wrong compass - reading the wrong end of the needle - and held a heading he believed was carrying him west.

Instead, it carried him east, out over the water toward Europe. He flew into a solid bank of cloud and stayed on instruments for hours. When the clouds finally broke, the American Southwest should have been below him. Instead there was open ocean - and then an impossibly green coastline of stone-walled fields and hedgerows.

It was Ireland.

“Just Got In From New York. Where Am I?”

Corrigan landed the Robin at Baldonnel Aerodrome outside Dublin, 28 hours and 13 minutes after leaving Brooklyn. Stiff, greasy, and half-deaf from the engine, he climbed out, walked up to the astonished ground crew, and delivered the line that made him immortal: “Just got in from New York. Where am I?”

Told he was in Ireland, he claimed surprise and said he’d been flying to California - he must have read his compass wrong. Nobody believed a word of it. Everyone knew he had spent years begging to fly the Atlantic, knew about the rebuilt engine and the extra tanks, and here he was standing in Dublin having flown exactly the route he’d been denied, in exactly the airplane they said couldn’t do it.

How a Rule-Breaker Became a Folk Hero

Officials were not amused. They suspended his pilot’s certificate for 14 days. But the ocean liner carrying Corrigan and his crated-up airplane back to America took about the same 14 days to cross - so by the time he stepped off the boat in New York Harbor, his license was valid again.

By then, America had fallen in love with him. The year was 1938: the Depression was grinding on and the news from Europe was grim. Then along came a grinning, humble young man who had thumbed his nose at the entire rulebook, crossed an ocean on nerve and a screwdriver, and insisted with a straight face that it was all an honest mistake.

New York threw him a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, reportedly drawing crowds of more than a million people - said to be even larger than the turnout for Lindbergh. The newspapers crowned him “Wrong Way” Corrigan, and he never broke character. For roughly 50 more years, until the day he died, anyone who asked got the same deadpan answer: the compass must have been off, and he’d meant to go to California. He even wrote a book about his life in the same spirit. He kept the Robin, too, storing that patched-together, $310 airplane for decades and bringing it out now and again.

The Real Lesson Behind the Legend

By modern standards, Corrigan broke nearly every rule: an unapproved airplane, a denied route, open water, no radio, a leaking fuel tank, and a compass he claimed he couldn’t read. Aviation safety rules are often written in the blood of the people who broke them first, and no instructor today would sign off on such a flight.

But Corrigan wasn’t reckless for its own sake. He was a craftsman who trusted his own work. He built that airplane, knew every rivet in it, and bet his life on it because he had earned the right to. There’s a real difference between recklessness and hard-won confidence - and the green fields of Ireland proved him right.

Key Takeaways

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan flew a rebuilt Curtiss Robin from Brooklyn to Ireland on July 17–18, 1938, in 28 hours and 13 minutes, after being denied permission for a transatlantic flight.
He bought the used Robin for about $310 in 1933 and rebuilt it himself, adding a Wright Whirlwind engine and extra fuel tanks that blocked his forward view.
As a young mechanic at Ryan Aeronautical, Corrigan had helped build Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in 1927, which inspired his own Atlantic ambition.
Authorities suspended his license for just 14 days - about the time it took his ship to bring him home - and New York welcomed him with a ticker-tape parade drawing over a million people.
He never admitted the flight was intentional, sticking to the backwards-compass story for the rest of his life.