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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.
The First Transoceanic Flights
By Alan Smith
Everyone knows about Charles Lindbergh and his 1927 flight from Long Island NY to Paris, but there were others that took on the Atlantic challenge and he was not the first to cross the Atlantic. The London Daily Mail had put up a fifty thousand dollar prize for the first non-stop crossing by air, and a number of pilots had their eye on that. The first actual Atlantic crossing had been made by a U.S. Navy NC-4 Curtiss flying boat in early 1919, but it was far from non-stop and took weeks with engine and navigation problems. In June of 1919, two British teams were at St John’s, Newfoundland with converted biplane bombers. They had shipped the planes over to Newfoundland to attempt West to East crossings with prevailing winds as a tailwind.
Harry G. Hawker and McKenzie Grieve planned to try with a Handley-Page bomber powered by four Rolls Royce engines, while John Alcock and navigator Arthur W, Brown were preparing a Vickers Vimy twin-engined bomber that had been built too late to be used in WW I. Both crews, of course, were thirsting for the Daily Mail prize, and both were making preparations at Lester’s Field near St John’s.