When Douglas Corrigan climbed out of his weather-beaten Curtiss Robin at Baldonnel Airfield near Dublin on 18 July 1938, he claimed to have made a simple navigational error. He had departed New York the previous day, supposedly bound for California, yet after twenty-eight hours in the air he found himself on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. Few believed his explanation, but the public loved the story and he earned the nickname “Wrong Way” Corrigan.
The flight was the culmination of a dream that had begun more than a decade earlier, when Charles Augustus Lindbergh’s historic solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1927 inspired a generation of would-be aviators. Corrigan, who had helped build Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, was among those determined to follow in the famous pilot’s wake, though his own journey to aviation fame would take a far more unconventional route.
Douglass Corrigan stands before his Curtiss Robin that took him across the Atlantic. Credit: History Net
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