July 18, 1938: Douglas Corrigan writes his name in the book of the history of aviation. Many people involved in aviation at the time wished he hadn't.
Born in Galveston, Texas in 1907, he became fascinated with airplanes while growing up in Los Angeles, became an airplane mechanic, and got his pilot's license at age 19. Working in San Diego in April 1927, he was part of the assembly crew for the Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles Lindbergh used to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean the next month, from New York's Long Island to Paris.
Intrigued by this success, Corrigan, of Irish descent, decided he wanted to fly from New York to Ireland. To raise money to buy his own plane, he performed aerobatic stunts. But this would inevitably get him fired from his mechanic jobs, and he moved around, delaying his dream trip.
In 1935, having finally assembled a Curtiss Robin, but with parts from various other planes -- similar to the later Johnny Cash song "One Piece at a Time" -- he applied to the Bureau of Air Commerce, forerunner of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), for permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland. Although the BAC deemed his plane fit for transcontinental flights over land, it did not think it was flightworthy for crossing water, and turned him down for that purpose.
He refused to accept that his dream was dead. He kept modifying his plane, and reapplying, but was always turned down. Finally, on July 9, 1938, he applied for permission to fly the plane from San Diego to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and back, and got it. Upon arrival at Bennett Field, he filed a flight plan to return to San Diego on July 17.
That morning, he asked Kenneth Behr, manager of Bennett Field, which runway he should use. Behr said he could use any runway, as long as he didn't take off to the west, in the direction of the administration building where Behr had his office, so that he didn't crash into it, which would not only have killed Corrigan, but left Behr without an office.
So Behr thought nothing of it when, at 5:15 AM on July 17, Corrigan took off from Runway 06, heading east, figuring Corrigan would, given sufficient ground clearance, turn around and head west. He had no reason to believe Corrigan was doing anything other than what he said he would do.
Corrigan had no radio, so he couldn't contact anyone and ask if he was going the right way. His compass was 20 years old, and may not have been working properly. After 10 hours of flight, Corrigan noticed that his feet were cold. He looked down, and saw that gasoline was leaking from one of his tanks. He took a screwdriver, and punched a hole through the cockpit floor, draining the gasoline. This fact, which he later freely admitted, would, alone, have contradicted his stated intention to fly west from Brooklyn to San Diego, and his later statement that he only noticed his "error" 26 hours into his flight.
On July 18, at 2:28 PM local time, 28 hours and 13 minutes into his flight, Corrigan landed -- not in San Diego, or anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, but at Baldonnel Aerodrome, outside Dublin, Ireland. If anything, his flight was more audacious than Lindbergh's: He had not the best plane that money could have bought at the time, but, rather, a "flying coffin" that he had personally jerry-rigged; and he had no one who knew what he was really doing.
Those awaiting him on the ground in San Diego would receive word by telegraph that he had landed safely in Ireland. Had he crashed into the ocean, no one would have ever known what happened, and the searchers, from New York to California, would have been looking over 2,700 miles of the wrong place. He would have been just a footnote in the history of early aviation.
Instead, he was an instant celebrity, hailed by the press as "Wrong Way Corrigan." Aviation officials sent a 600-word telegram to list the regulations broken by his flight, in a medium that encouraged brevity by charging at a rate per word. Despite the extent of Corrigan's illegality, he received only a mild punishment: His pilot's certificate was suspended for 14 days.
Upon his return to New York -- he and his plane came back by ship, arriving on the last day of his suspension -- the City gave him a ticker-tape parade, and more people attended his than Lindbergh's. He accepted an invitation to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House.
He had a ghostwritten autobiography, titled That's My Story (with the implied follow-up: "And I'm sticking to it!"), that came out in time to be given as a Christmas present. He sent Lindbergh a copy, and Lindbergh responded with a friendly 4-page handwritten letter. Corrigan endorsed "wrong-way" products, including a wristwatch that ran counter-clockwise.
In 1939, he played himself in the film The Flying Irishman. He was paid $75,000, about 30 years' worth of income as an airfield mechanic. In World War II, he tested newly-built bomber planes. Afterward, he was a commercial pilot for a small California airline, always arriving where he said he would -- although, given the nature of air travel, not always on time, not that it was usually his fault. In 1950, he bought an orange grove in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Ana, California. He lived there with his wife and 3 sons.
In 1957, he appeared on the TV game show To Tell the Truth. With help from the 2 stand-ins, he stumped the panel, including fellow Irish-American Bill Cullen, although he continued to push the lie that he had arrived in Ireland by mistake. (Given the additional 19 years, and the fact that he hadn't been seen on TV frequently in the interim, it was very possible for the panelists not to recognize the real Corrigan.)
He died in 1995, at the age of 88, sticking to his story until the end. His plane is now on display at the Planes Of Fame Air Museum in the Los Angeles suburb of Chino, California.
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July 18, 1938 was a Monday. British rock keyboard player Ian Stewart and Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven was born on this day.
Only 3 baseball games were played:
* The New York Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-4 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Paul Waner went 2-for-3 with a walk. Lloyd Waner went 1-for-3 with 2 RBIs. Mel Ott went 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI.
* The Chicago Cubs beat the Boston Bees (as the Braves were known from 1936 to 1940), 7-6 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
* And the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
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