‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan is right back in the news.

It’s been nearly 50 years since the public has heard the sound of the small Curtiss Robin airplane that carried Douglas Corrigan from New York City to Ireland instead of his intended destination: Long Beach. That mistake, in 1938, forever attached the nickname “Wrong Way” to his name.

That was supposed to have been corrected Saturday at the Western Museum of Flight in Hawthorne, with the turning of the single propeller and the firing of the engine before an audience for the first time since 1940--the year “Wrong Way” Corrigan disassembled the plane and stashed it in his Santa Ana garage.

But old engines with faint spark have a way of interfering with history in the making, and after a couple of hours and much tinkering and replacing of oil-clogged spark plugs, the effort was abandoned.

“It’s not getting the spark at the plugs,” said Bob Hayos, an aviation mechanic and retired Northrop Corp. engineer.

But, for the handful of people who turned out, the engine failure was the only disappointment of the afternoon in which Corrigan--81, energetic, talky, wearing his tattered 1935 flight jacket, and looking like an Irish pixie--commanded attention with the deftness of a star performer.

He helped in the final reassembling of the plane--which was trucked from Santa Ana and put back together by museum volunteers in preparation for the Hawthorne Air Faire Aug. 27-28, where Corrigan will be honored and his plane displayed.

He guided and helped push the tail section as it was moved out of the museum hangar to the Tarmac, and climbed into the small cockpit he occupied during his historic flight and remembered his celebrated adventure half a century ago.

“I didn’t have a cushion, just a plywood floor,” he said. “That’s how I went over.” He looked over the simple instruments in his “crate,” as he called it--which already was 10 years old when he bought it for $900--and discovered that the thermometer, then registering 85 degrees, still works.

Corrigan repeated his story--questioned by skeptics for years--that the flight to Ireland, which followed government refusal to let him cross the Atlantic, was all a mistake. “They made me take off to the east, which got me started wrong,” he said. “Then I followed the wrong end of the compass needle.” And, Corrigan said, he flew above the clouds, so he didn’t know he was over water and not land.

For Edith Van Gordon of Hawthorne, Saturday was an opportunity to correct a mistake made 50 years earlier when she tried to photograph Corrigan and his plane. She was in Fort Worth, Tex., where Corrigan touched down on the way home after the Ireland flight. “I borrowed a camera and took a number of pictures of him getting out of the plane and walking over to a limousine for the big parade they were having,” said Van Gordon. “But when they were developed, they were all blank.”

On Saturday, she not only got to to photograph Corrigan but met him and had her picture taken with him. “I hope they come out this time,” she said modestly.

Herman Villalva, an 11-year-old from Torrance who had Corrigan autograph his flight manual, got some encouragement for his own ambitions to become a pilot and solo to faraway places. “My goal is to fly from here to Hawaii, Hawaii to France, and France back to California,” he said, making it clear he knows the route he’s going to take.