Wrong Way Corrigan - A Last Bit of Fun Before World War II
By Alan Smith
In October of 1925 when 18-year-old Douglas Corrigan went for a ride in a Curtiss Jenny, he had no idea that in thirteen years he would be both famous and notorious. What the ride did was change his goal in life from being an architect to living in the growing world of aviation. He started taking flying lessons every Sunday and after twenty Sundays he soloed. The government rules and regulations of aviation were still forming and Corrigan soon had a pilot’s license in hand. He also had good mechanical talent gained from a few years in the construction business. When his parents divorced, he had quit school and gone to work to earn money. His father was a construction engineer and Douglas had learned a lot from him.
Claude Ryan and his partner B.F Mahoney were building airplanes as the Ryan Aeronautical Company at the California airfield where Corrigan learned to fly and also had a shop in San Diego. They offered Corrigan a job as a mechanic at their San Diego operation when they decided to shut down their factory near Los Angeles and move south. It was 1927 and Corrigan saw about a half dozen partially built airplanes in Ryan’s San Diego plant. They just sat there because of cancelled orders. Corrigan went to work wondering how long this job would last.
Then Charles Lindbergh showed up and after some negotiation asked Ryan to build a single seat airplane that could cross the Atlantic. Ryan agreed, telling Lindbergh that he could redesign his Ryan M-1 and build the airplane Lindbergh wanted in two months for $10,000. Lindbergh accepted the offer and Corrigan began work on the Spirit of St. Louis. He was fascinated by Lindbergh’s intention of flying from New York to Paris to win the $25,000 prize offered by New York Hotelier Orteig for the first pilot to make that flight. The Spirit was completed on time with a ten-foot increase in wingspan and special fuel tanks. Lindbergh flew it to New York and then made his historic flight. Corrigan decided he could do that too, and being Irish-American, decided on Dublin as his destination.
When Ryan decided to move his business to the Midwest, Corrigan stayed in San Diego for a while working as a mechanic at a new flight school called Airtech. He was busy enough to only fly on his lunch hour. He would start doing chandelles in company airplanes and got called on the carpet for that. So, he would just head south and do such maneuvers where he could not be seen by his boss and then fly innocently back to make a careful and gentle landing and go back to work in the shop.
After working several jobs in San Diego, and flying his employers’ airplanes, he got a transport pilot’s license in 1929. In 1930, he and his friend Steve Reich decided to go east and start a flying business there to take passengers from town to town on the east coast. This led to barnstorming that proved more lucrative and Corrigan used his self-taught aerobatics to amuse their audiences.
In 1933, he decided to return to the west coast and bought an OX-5 powered Curtiss Robin for $310 dollars and flew it west. Once there, he returned to work as an aircraft and engine mechanic, and with his dream of a transatlantic flight still churning in his mind, began modifications to the little Robin for a flight to Ireland. This included installation of a Wright J5-6 165 hp five cylinder radial engine to replace the 90 hp OX-5 and, of course, additional fuel tanks wherever he could fit them.
In 1935, he made his first application to the Bureau of Commerce’s aviation division for permission to fly the Atlantic. The bureaucrats denied that, but said he could make long distance cross country flights. For another year, Corrigan tried to keep pace with the growing aviation regulations by making changes to the Curtiss Robin and tried again with what was now the Federal Bureau of Air Commerce to get permission to fly from New York to Ireland. Without explanation, he was told to wait another year. Also, although the Robin had no radio, he was ordered to get a radio operator’s license. To say the least, Douglas Corrigan was getting exasperated.
He returned to California, got the radio operator’s license, and then, in 1937, made another stab at getting federal permission to make his transatlantic flight. This time, Amelia Earhart had recently disappeared somewhere near Howland Island in the Pacific and no one in the government wanted to get involved with another flight across an ocean. On top of that, the feds refused to renew the Robin’s airworthiness certificate. During those days, enforcement of regulations was weak, and Corrigan continued to fly his plane, now named Sunshine without attracting attention. In late October, he made a difficult flight back to New York, often delayed for days by chronic bad weather. Landing at Floyd Bennett Field, he realized that the weather was getting cold – too cold to fly across the north Atlantic. He decided to make a nonstop flight back to California, filled his fuel tanks, and took off heading west. Again, no one paid any attention to him or questioned him about the validity of his airplane’s license.
On the way back, he had to deal with ice forming in the engine’s air intake. Working the throttle, he backfired the engine to clear it and kept going. He landed at Adams field in the San Fernando Valley and finally ran into a federal inspector who grounded Sunshine. The Robin stayed in a hangar there for six months. Corrigan worked on it, overhauling the engine, and eventually got an inspector to grant an experimental license. He also got permission to make nonstop flights to New York and back to Los Angeles.
On the trip to New York, he flew through bad weather instead of burning more fuel to go around storms. As he neared the east coast, the main tank developed a slight leak and he landed at Roosevelt field with four gallons left. He added some gas and went on to Floyd Bennett field in Brooklyn. He thought about repairing the leaky tank and decided to let it go because that work would take a week or more. He filed a flight plan to Los Angeles as permitted, but was thinking about Ireland. It was July 16, 1938. He told everyone he would be leaving for Los Angeles in the early morning of the next day.
In the wee hours of July 17, he topped off all tanks and by four a.m. he was ready to go. He had two chocolate bars, a quart of water and two boxes of fig bars, and his only map was of the United States with the path to Los Angeles marked on it. Starting the engine, he ran it up and was satisfied. He checked for any oil leaks with a flashlight and let the engine warm up and inspected the rest of Sunshine. A little after five in the morning he taxied onto the 4,200-foot, east-west runway and began the takeoff run. With 320 gallons of gasoline and 16 gallons of oil, this took 3,200 feet. He crossed the eastern edge of Floyd Bennett field at 50 feet, climbed slowly and disappeared into the early morning mist.
Ten hours later, he felt his feet become cold and saw that the cockpit floor was awash in gasoline. The leak in the main tank had gotten worse. The only tool he had with him was a screwdriver and he used this to punch an opening in the cockpit floor on the opposite side from the hot exhaust pipe so the spilled fuel could safely drain. He had planned to fly at reduced speed to conserve gasoline, but with the increased leak he needed to pick up the pace. He brought the RPM up from 1,600 to 1,900. He slid open a window as the hours passed and stuck his head out, partly to stay awake and partly to clear the fumes out of the cockpit.
He later claimed that 26 hours had passed before he realized he was going in the “wrong” direction and that he was over an ocean. He saw a small fishing boat and thought he must be close to land. He was right and shortly thereafter a coastline came into sight. At 28 hours and 13 minutes, he landed at Baldonnel Airport at Dublin. Now he would encounter a new bureaucracy. Here he was in Ireland, with no permission to make the flight, no passport and no entry paperwork.
Surprisingly, the Irish officials proved relatively genial. A customs officer just wanted to know if he had landed anywhere else after leaving New York. The airport official simply called the U.S. minister, Stephen Cudahy in Dublin and he came out to talk to Corrigan and asked him to explain how he had wound up going in the wrong direction on a trip that was supposed to be to California. Corrigan went into a lengthy explanation involving a faulty compass, heavy fog, and general confusion about where he was. He claimed at one point to have been reading the wrong end of his spare compass needle.
Finally Cudahy arranged for Corrigan and his airplane to return to New York on the liner Manhattan. By the time the ship reached New York, Douglas Corrigan found that he had become not only a hero but a hilarious hero. He was given ticker tape parades in Manhattan and Chicago and it was the newspapers that gave him the name “wrong way Corrigan” With all this popularity and humor, all the Feds had done when they found out he was in Ireland was suspend his pilot’s license for 14 days. The suspension ended on August 4, the day he arrived by ship in New York.
Corrigan returned to aviation, and, during the war, ferried bombers for the Air Transport Command, and after the war, flew for a small California airline. He retired from aviation in 1950 and bought an orange grove in Santa Ana California. He lived there quietly with his wife and sons.
There was a revival of his wrong way fame in 1988 when aviation enthusiasts reassembled Sunshine for a western airshow and got the engine running again to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his flight to Ireland. Corrigan was so excited that guards were placed at each wing, and they were ready to tie the tail to the front bumper of a police car to keep Corrigan from getting in and taking off in the Curtiss Robin.
He never admitted that the flight across the Atlantic was intentional, sticking to the story he told in Ireland in 1938. Some, however, have reported that, in the late 1980s, he did in fact acknowledge that he intended to fly the Atlantic on that July day in 1938. He died on December 9, 1995 at the age of 88.
