Wrong Way Corrigan, the Patched-Up Curtiss Robin, and the Nineteen Thirty-Eight Flight to Ireland That Everybody Knew Wasn't a Mistake

On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn in a battered Curtiss Robin, having filed a flight plan for California. Twenty-eight hours and thirteen minutes later he landed near Dublin, Ireland, and claimed he had simply read his compass backwards. Nobody believed him - and that was exactly the point.

Who Was Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan?

Douglas Corrigan earned his nickname through one of the most famous flights in aviation history. History remembers him as Wrong Way Corrigan, a title he embraced for the rest of his life while insisting, with a straight face, that his transatlantic crossing was an honest navigational mistake.

He was no amateur. Corrigan was an experienced pilot and a first-rate aircraft mechanic. That combination is what made his “mistake” so impossible to believe.

Corrigan’s Connection to the Spirit of St. Louis

In the late 1920s, Corrigan was a young mechanic in San Diego working for Ryan Airlines - the company that built the Spirit of St. Louis.

He didn’t just sweep floors. Corrigan worked directly on the airplane, helping build the wing, pulling fabric and setting fittings on the very machine Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927.

Corrigan was there, at twenty years old, the morning Lindbergh lifted off from San Diego on the first leg of that journey. He watched a plain silver monoplane he had helped assemble disappear into history.

That moment lodged something in him. Lindbergh flew to Paris and became the most famous man on Earth, and Corrigan was left standing on the ground asking a single question: why not me? That thought worked on him for eleven years.

The Airplane: A $310 Curtiss Robin

In 1933, Corrigan bought himself an airplane - a used Curtiss Robin, for which he paid about $310.

The Robin was a high-wing monoplane, a small cabin aircraft from the late 1920s with room for a pilot and a couple of passengers. It was honest and gentle - the kind of ship you’d use to fly mail into a cow pasture. It was not a fast airplane, not a strong airplane, and absolutely not an ocean airplane.

So Corrigan rebuilt it the way only a mechanic with a dream and no money can:

He hung a bigger engine on the nose, a Wright Whirlwind, then built up a second engine out of two junked ones and bolted that on instead.
He packed the cabin with so many extra fuel tanks that, from the pilot’s seat, he could not see forward at all - the entire front of the cabin was a wall of gasoline.
He flew by looking out the side windows and down, rigging up a small periscope arrangement to see ahead.

The instrument panel was bare-bones: a compass, an altimeter, a turn indicator, and some engine gauges. No usable radio. No real navigation aids. This was seat-of-the-pants flying and a wet finger in the wind.

Why the Government Refused His Transatlantic Flight

Corrigan applied again and again for permission to make a transatlantic crossing. The authorities took one look at his patched-together, fuel-blind Robin and refused every time.

They would certify the airplane only for experimental purposes - never for an ocean crossing. In their view, the machine wasn’t fit to cross the street, let alone the Atlantic.

So Corrigan did what he did best. He kept working on the airplane, and he kept asking.

The Flight to Brooklyn - and the “Return Trip” to California

In the summer of 1938, Corrigan flew the Robin from California across the country to New York - a grueling 27-hour haul, more or less nonstop, just to reach the East Coast. He landed at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.

On paper, the plan was simple: rest, then fly back home to California. His paperwork said West Coast. Home.

By this point the fuel tanks were leaking, with gasoline sloshing on the cabin floor. One inspector later said the airplane should never have left the ground. But it was Corrigan’s airplane, and he’d flown it all the way from California, so the field let him go.

The Wrong Way to Ireland

On the morning of July 17, 1938, Corrigan climbed into the overloaded Robin at Floyd Bennett Field. Fog hung over the field. The manager, worried the heavy airplane wouldn’t get off, pointed him down the longest runway available.

Loaded with roughly 320 gallons of gasoline, the little ship staggered into the air and clawed up into the murk. Then witnesses on the ground watched Corrigan bank around and head east - out over the Atlantic, straight into the fog. Someone figured he was just circling to get on course for California.

He was not circling.

Corrigan set the Curtiss Robin down at Baldonnel Aerodrome near Dublin, Ireland, on the morning of July 18, 1938 - 28 hours and 13 minutes after leaving Brooklyn. He had crossed roughly 2,000 miles of open North Atlantic, over water, in the dark, with a leaking fuel system, using nothing but a compass, dead reckoning, and nerve.

He shut down the engine, climbed out stiff and cold, and delivered the line that made him immortal:

“Just got in from New York. Where am I?”

They told him: Ireland. Corrigan looked genuinely puzzled and explained that he had taken off for California but must have gotten his compass backwards in the fog and followed the wrong end of the needle for 28 hours.

Wrong way.

Did He Really Get Lost? Why Nobody Believed Him

Nobody believed the story - not the Irish, not the newspapers, not the aviation authorities. The notion that a skilled pilot and mechanic, a man who helped build the Spirit of St. Louis, could accidentally fly the exact opposite of his filed heading across an ocean for more than a day and land at the one place he’d been begging to reach for years was simply too much to swallow.

But nobody could prove it, either. He had filed for California. His compass was genuinely old and could be misread backwards by anyone determined to do so. The story had just enough daylight in it to survive.

Every time someone asked whether he’d done it on purpose, Corrigan got a small twinkle in his eye and repeated: no, it was a navigational mistake. Wrong way. He never once changed his story for the rest of his life.

The Punishment That Became a Parade

The authorities suspended Corrigan’s pilot certificate as punishment. But the suspension ran for exactly the number of days it took him to sail home - by the time he and his airplane returned to the United States by boat, his certificate was valid again.

America did not treat him like a lawbreaker. New York City threw Wrong Way Corrigan a ticker-tape parade up Broadway - one that, by some accounts, drew crowds even larger than Lindbergh’s.

The country was deep in the Great Depression, and here was a grinning, wisecracking mechanic who had cheated the rulebook and the ocean and gotten away with it. He was exactly the hero a tired nation wanted. Corrigan later wrote a book about the flight, titling it “That’s My Story,” and even played himself in a movie about his life.

Why the Flight Still Matters

Strip away the wisecracks and the ticker tape, and what remains is one of the great feats of raw airmanship in aviation’s golden age.

Forget whether it was legal or intentional and just look at the flying: a single man, in a cheap, heavy, primitively equipped airplane with no reliable radio and fuel tanks blocking his forward view, held a heading across 2,000 miles of fog-bound North Atlantic and hit an island. He didn’t ditch, didn’t get lost, and didn’t die - a crossing that killed better-funded, better-equipped aviators before and after him.

That isn’t luck. Luck doesn’t fly for 28 hours. It was skill, preparation, and a decade of quiet obsession cashed in on one gray morning over Brooklyn.

There’s a lesson in it, even for pilots flying today with a moving map glowing on the panel: the airplane didn’t cross that ocean - the man did. The Robin was just leaky tanks, fabric, and a scratch-built engine. What carried it to Ireland was one man’s refusal to be told what he could do with his own hands and his own airplane.

Key Takeaways

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan flew a used Curtiss Robin (bought for about $310 in 1933) from Brooklyn to Ireland on July 17–18, 1938, a crossing of 28 hours and 13 minutes.
Corrigan had worked for Ryan Airlines and helped build the Spirit of St. Louis, watching Lindbergh depart San Diego in 1927 - the spark for his own transatlantic ambition.
U.S. authorities repeatedly denied him permission for a transatlantic flight, certifying his fuel-tank-crammed Robin only for experimental use.
He officially filed for a return trip to California, then flew east to Baldonnel Aerodrome near Dublin, claiming he’d misread his compass - a story he never abandoned.
His pilot certificate was briefly suspended, but he returned home to a ticker-tape parade up Broadway and lasting fame as a Depression-era folk hero.