Wrong Way Corrigan, the Dublin Landing Nobody Was Supposed to Believe, and the Transatlantic Flight Filed as a Trip to California

On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on an approved flight plan to Los Angeles, California. Twenty-eight hours and thirteen minutes later, he landed at an aerodrome outside Dublin, Ireland, climbed out of his battered Curtiss Robin monoplane, and told the Irish ground crew he must have gotten confused. Nobody believed him. Nobody much cared.

Who Was Douglas Corrigan?

Born in Galveston, Texas in 1907, Corrigan came up through aviation the hard way - sweeping floors and washing aircraft at a Los Angeles airfield as a teenager. In 1927, he was working on the shop floor at Ryan Airlines in San Diego when the company received the contract to build Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic aircraft. Corrigan helped rivet the Spirit of St. Louis together, working double shifts through the build.

When Lindbergh lifted off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island in May 1927, Corrigan wasn’t watching a stranger disappear into the Atlantic. He was watching something his hands had helped make real. He decided he wanted to do it himself.

Why the Government Kept Saying No

By the mid-1930s, the Bureau of Air Commerce - the civil aviation regulator of the day - had developed firm opinions about what qualified as an airworthy transatlantic machine. Corrigan’s did not qualify.

He had purchased his Curtiss Robin monoplane in 1935 for a few hundred dollars, which was roughly what the market suggested it was worth. The Robin was a high-wing cabin monoplane originally designed in the late 1920s to carry a pilot and two passengers in modest comfort. By the time Corrigan finished modifying it, comfort was a distant memory. He installed additional fuel tanks in the nose, the fuselage, and under the cabin floor, bringing the total fuel load to roughly 320 gallons - well past what the original airframe engineers had accounted for. One forward tank had a persistent seep that put fuel vapor around the pilot’s feet. He rigged a drain tube to manage the worst of it.

Corrigan applied for transatlantic crossing approval at least three times over two or more years. Each time, the bureau’s answer was essentially the same: the airplane was not airworthy for an ocean crossing, the fuel system modifications introduced unacceptable hazards, and the safety margins were insufficient. He modified the airplane and reapplied. No. He came back with updated paperwork. No.

The Flight Plan Nobody Was Really Reading Closely

In July 1938, Corrigan flew the Robin nonstop from California to Floyd Bennett Field - 27 hours, solo - and announced he was resting before the return trip. He filed a new flight plan: Los Angeles, California. July 17, departure 0515.

The Bureau of Air Commerce approved it. It was a perfectly legal transcontinental flight. There was no rule against flying west in a modified Robin.

There has been persistent speculation over the decades that some officials understood exactly what Corrigan was planning and approved the California flight plan with a deliberately practiced lack of scrutiny. Aviation in 1938 still had frontier edges. If a man wanted to bet his life on his own preparation, some at the bureau took the view that you let him make that bet and live with the outcome.

The Crossing

Corrigan arrived at the Robin before sunrise on July 17. He packed a box of fig newtons and a quart of chocolate milk. The engine started without drama, and witnesses at Floyd Bennett Field watched him take off and fly east.

He had no radio, no co-pilot, and no autopilot. Navigation was dead reckoning: a magnetic compass, a clock, a fuel gauge he had calibrated himself, and whatever stars broke through the overcast long enough to be useful. He knew his hourly fuel burn from the transcontinental flight and counted hours against the gauges. Dead reckoning over featureless ocean is an act of sustained mathematical faith - you believe in your compass heading, your airspeed, and your fuel burn, and you keep believing until landfall proves you right.

The North Atlantic in July is not gentle. The Robin was heavy and sluggish with all that fuel weight, pitching through turbulence over cold black water for the better part of a day and a half. Corrigan ate his fig newtons somewhere over the middle of the ocean and stayed awake by force of will - fuel vapor seeping around his feet for the entire crossing.

The Dublin Landing

The coast of Ireland appeared on the morning of July 18. Corrigan followed the coastline, located the aerodrome at Baldonnel outside Dublin, and put the Robin on the ground without incident. When mechanics checked the tanks, he had 10 gallons of fuel remaining.

No transatlantic arrival had been announced. No one was expecting him. The ground crew was confused.

Corrigan climbed stiffly out of the cockpit, looked around at the green Irish countryside, and told the crew he had taken off from New York intending to fly to Los Angeles. One official reportedly asked him where he thought he was. Corrigan looked around and said he guessed this wasn’t Los Angeles. He appeared to be perfectly serious.

The Aftermath: Wrong Way Corrigan

News reached the United States in waves - first confusion, then official indignation from the Bureau of Air Commerce, then barely suppressed laughter that spread from newsrooms into every barbershop and diner in the country. The newspapers named him Wrong Way Corrigan, and the label attached immediately and permanently.

The bureau’s formal response was restrained by any measure. They suspended his certificate for 10 days - then made it a suspended suspension, meaning the penalty never took effect. The accompanying fine was nominal. Every official who sat down to write the reprimand was fighting the same losing battle with a smile.

By the time Corrigan boarded a ship back to New York at the end of July, the ticker-tape parade was already in an advanced state of planning. He came up lower Broadway on July 29, 1938, to a crowd that stretched as far back from the curb as the buildings allowed. At a press conference, a reporter asked him directly whether the flight had been intentional. Corrigan looked at the reporter with complete and practiced sincerity. I just got mixed up, he said.

Was He Actually Any Good?

The comedy of the story can obscure a straightforward fact: Corrigan was a genuinely accomplished aviator. He had worked on Lindbergh’s airplane and understood from the inside what an ocean crossing required. His solo nonstop transcontinental proved both the airplane and himself before he attempted the Atlantic. His dead reckoning across more than 3,000 miles of open ocean - compass and clock only - was technically precise. He hit the Irish coast close to where the geometry said he should.

The Bureau of Air Commerce was not wrong that the Robin was a dangerous machine for the crossing. The fuel seeping into the cockpit was a genuine hazard. The gross weight exceeded the airframe’s real limits. The Atlantic is a long graveyard for pilots who were almost good enough, and the gap between Corrigan’s outcome and a different outcome was narrower than the celebration made it seem.

But the preparation was real. The navigation was real. He had done the work.

The Rest of His Life

Corrigan spent two weeks in Ireland and England being celebrated and interviewed before boarding a ship home. Back in the United States, he appeared in a 1939 film called The Flying Irishman, playing himself - a role that required minimal preparation. He eventually settled in California and farmed for many years, largely absent from the airshow and lecture circuits. The celebrity was pleasant to him, but not necessary.

For decades, if asked whether the crossing had been intentional, he kept the story: compass trouble, clouds, navigational confusion. He told it so many times and so consistently that the telling became its own form of artistry - a perfectly maintained fiction worn smooth by repetition until it fit the hand like a well-broken-in glove. In his later years there are accounts of something resembling a wink in his voice in private moments, a loosening of the straight face he had held for fifty years. He never gave a formal admission. He didn’t need to.

Douglas Corrigan died in 1995 at the age of 88, having outlived nearly everyone who stood on the tarmac at Floyd Bennett Field that July morning and watched him climb into the patched-up Robin with his box of fig newtons.

Key Takeaways

Douglas Corrigan departed Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn on July 17, 1938 on an approved Los Angeles flight plan and landed in Dublin, Ireland 28 hours and 13 minutes later.
The Bureau of Air Commerce had denied his transatlantic crossing application at least three times, judging his heavily modified Curtiss Robin unairworthy for an ocean flight.
He navigated more than 3,000 miles of open Atlantic by dead reckoning alone - compass, clock, and fuel gauge - arriving at Baldonnel with 10 gallons to spare.
The bureau’s formal punishment was a 10-day certificate suspension that was never enforced and a nominal fine; the entire country was effectively in on the joke.
He maintained his “I got mixed up” story for the rest of his life, never offering a formal admission - but the flight had always told itself.