Return of ‘Wrong Way’ : Fifty Years Later, Douglas Corrigan Talks About His Famous ‘Mistake’ and, at 81, His Plans to Fly Again

A pair of early aviation’s most audacious relics, both worn by time in seclusion, are returning to public life.

One is Douglas Corrigan, that Corrigan, Wrong Way Corrigan who in 1938 took off from New York, landed in Ireland instead of Long Beach and blamed it all on the bad luck of his Irish navigating.

Today, 81-year-old Corrigan is more crusty than feisty, prefers his own company as a man made a loner by private sadness--yet remains a blarney-stuffed, rule-bending bantam.

His airplane also is out of hiding.

This Curtiss Robin was a 9-year-old, well-abused mustee when it carried Corrigan across the Atlantic for 28 hours. Then it was taken apart in 1940 and stacked in the garage of Corrigan’s Santa Ana home.

Last week, in answer to pleas from the executive of the Southern California Historical Aviation Foundation, Corrigan agreed to have the airplane trucked to Hawthorne Municipal Airport for reassembly and display at this month’s Hawthorne Air Faire.

Ready to Go Again

He was at the controls when its radial engine was fired up for the first time in almost a half-century. And Corrigan says he is ready to “fly this thing again.

“All we’ve got to do is get the shocks leveled off, some patches on the fabric and a couple of wheels under the tail skid,” he said.

Just when does he intend to fly? “At the (Aug. 27-28) Air Faire.”

At his age? “I’ve just had my (pilot’s) medical renewed.”

But after a layoff of how many years? “I haven’t flown since 1972. But you never really forget and I’ve got two weeks to brush up.”

Corrigan certainly is not concerned that the Robin has never been issued a Certificate of Airworthiness.

“For one flight, there’s a thing called a ferry permit,” he explained.

But that’s only good for a single trip from A to B for the purpose of repairs or delivery. An air show flight would mean taking off and landing at the same airport. “Then I can always take off, get lost and have to come back here,” Corrigan said with a grin.

FAA Inspectors Arbitrary

Californians, however, should not anticipate the sight of the two legends aloft. When it comes to air safety, Federal Aviation Administration inspectors are noticeably arbitrary. When it comes to civic liability, organizers of public events can be positively dictatorial.

“We know he (Corrigan) wants to fly the airplane so we’ve got to be careful,” said Leo Gay, president of the foundation. “We’ve slowly got to convince him that times have changed, that he can’t do it (fly) on a ferry permit and that the FAA will have to go all over the airplane before it can fly.”

“He flew the wrong way once, a long time ago, and got away with it. But I don’t think he’ll try it again.”

At the show, Gay added, Corrigan will be asked to taxi to a reviewing stand.

“But we’ll have men walking on each wing tip in case he decides to go beyond that,” he said. “(Airports Director) Bob Trimborne has also suggested that we tie a very long rope to the tail skid and maybe hook it to a police car.”

Nonconformity, of course, is Corrigan’s hallmark.

In the ‘30s, this Texas-born, Irish-American son of a railroad engineer, drifted and barnstormed and worked as an airplane mechanic from San Diego to New York.

He was the 11th pilot to duplicate Charles Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic crossing--but the only one to do it with a clapped-out engine bolted to a second-hand airplane that carried fewer instruments than a 1938 Cadillac.

Such shortcomings had not been lost on the Department of Commerce. It consistently denied Corrigan’s requests for a permit to fly the Atlantic. But on July 17, 1938, with permission only to attempt a non-stop run from New York to Long Beach, Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field. By a dumb mistake, he insisted, he misread his compass while flying above solid cloud layers. By dumb luck, he swears, he broke out near the airport at Baldonnel, Ireland.

The world loved this toothy broth of a pilot who had shown a government that all its regulation of men couldn’t smother one man’s honest determination.

Broadway’s ticker-tape parade for Corrigan was bigger than Lindbergh’s. He received money and medals; there were Corrigan watches that ran backward, an autobiography and a movie.

But World War II produced other fliers to worship.

Corrigan flew as a test pilot for Douglas Aircraft and at war’s end bought an orange grove in Santa Ana and backed away from his public.

It was a seclusion that grew darker. The citrus business was not a success. Corrigan sold all but his house and the garage holding the airplane.

His wife Elizabeth died in 1966, and friends say Corrigan was shattered.

A son Roy was killed in 1972 in a light plane crash on Santa Catalina Island and, those close to his grief add, Corrigan was almost destroyed.

Corrigan refused to open his front door to reporters or historians. He would not answer his phone. Friends lost patience. America almost lost a brash hero.

But now Corrigan is back.

Long Beach Ceremony

He surfaced fully, last month, for a ceremony at Long Beach Municipal Airport honoring the 50th anniversary of his flight. Then he accepted an invitation from the Royal Aeronautical Society to return to Ireland to be feted and remembered by Dublin and Baldonnel.

Corrigan has been his own cocky self, always in the cracked, oil-caked leather jacket he wore on the 1938 flight, still repeating the whiskery one-liners of 50 years ago.

“Shake the hand that shook the hand of Charles Lindbergh. . . .

“When I landed in Ireland and said my name was Corrigan, the policeman said: Just another Irishman coming home. . . . “When I first saw Ireland there were no bathing beauties on the beach, no orange groves, so I knew it wasn’t California. . . .”

Why Corrigan has chosen to return to semi-public life is not something he easily discusses. He has broken retirement, he says lightly, “because these guys (Air Faire officials) talked me out of it.

Attention Is ‘All Right’

“You see, nobody else wanted to pay me any money. These guys are and they’ve helped me put the airplane back together. The attention? It’s all right. It doesn’t bother me one way or another.”

But it does bother Corrigan, he said, to be part of functions that are not directly involved with the nuts and lock washers of general aviation. He’s a pushover for events that recognize early pioneers and dreamers who paid for fame out of their own pockets. He prefers to confine his public appearances to where he can smell and hear an airport in cities that have played a role in his life.

“I went to this celebration in Galveston because I was born there and to another in San Antonio because I grew up there,” he said. “You know, I talked to the Smithsonian and the San Diego museum in Balboa Park about displaying the airplane.

“But they’re not at airports. I’ve always wanted the airplane to be at an airport where the public can see and where maybe we can make a little money from photographs. That’s why I want to leave the airplane here (at Hawthorne) for a while. That’s where we belong.”

True. At Hawthorne airport last weekend, Corrigan was more ramp rat than celebrated visitor. It’s been that way since he accompanied his airplane to the field 11 days ago, supervising its reassembly, turning his own wrenches, often putting in 12-hour days.

His element is sitting in the old cockpit, backside on a bare board seat as it was, holding the stick, forgetting nothing and spilling his conversation into a lecture:

“Here’s the top compass but that didn’t work and the bottom compass, an old Pioneer I bought secondhand in Glendale, was here between my feet, where those screw holes are . . . this is the altimeter from a 1917 Jenny from World War I . . . air speed indicator that went up to 140 (m.p.h.) but I only ever had it up to 100 or maybe 110.

“I didn’t have any gauges on the five gas tanks. But I had a packet of gum with me and so I’d stick a piece of gum on the window here to keep track of how much gas I had left.”

That Famous Flight

Later, inevitably, sitting in the cool shadows of a hangar, Corrigan is pressed hard about flying the wrong way.

He knows that he can fool some of the people all of the time, but none of the pilots who easily recognize the improbability of any experienced flier following an incorrect heading for more than 28 hours.

In such squeezes, Corrigan falls back on sly hints.

“Some day, when I get a big audience with television and everything, I just might be able to think up another story,” he said.

Then, Wrong Way Corrigan, look me straight in the eye and on your oath as an honored son of Ireland, tell me you made an honest navigational mistake?

“I made a mistake.”

But an honest one?

“I was never really too honest, you know.”

We know. You weren’t born Douglas Corrigan, but changed your name because you admired the movie adventuring of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. So what is your real name?

“Clyde.”

Then Corrigan excused himself, eyeballed efforts to wheel his airplane into the hangar and started talking instructions.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done. This strut has to be done and the plane leveled. These tears in the fabric have to be patched and we’ve got to unstiffen the ailerons.

“Yeah, we’ve got to get this thing flying.”