On this day in 1907, Clyde Groce Corrigan was born in Texas in the US. When he was a child, the family moved house several times, and his parents finally divorced — after that he lived with his mother, sister, and brother in Los Angeles. He quit school without graduating, and worked in construction.
When he was 18, airplane rides in a biplane were offered near his home, and he paid $2.50 for a ticket. He liked it. A lot. The next week he started taking flying lessons and also learning aircraft mechanics. He soloed in early 1926, and shortly afterward changed careers to work on airplanes at the Ryan Aeronautical Company. That was the company building Charles Lindbergh’s airplane for his transatlantic flight attempt, and Corrigan actually worked on that very plane. When Lindbergh took possession of the plane in San Diego, Corrigan was the one who pulled out the chocks from the wheels when Lindbergh took off to fly to New York.
Lindbergh succeeded in flying across the Atlantic in 1927, and Corrigan thought he’d like to try the same thing someday. He left the Ryan company and became a mechanic for a local flying school. He was allowed to fly the school’s planes, but they banned him from performing the aerobatic stunts he’d learned. He responded by simply flying further away before practicing his stunts; that way they couldn’t see what he was doing.
Somewhere along the line Corrigan changed his name to Douglas Corrigan, and that was the name on the commercial pilot license he earned in 1929. With the license he was able to start a passenger service, and also performed aerobatics and offered plane rides. He saved his money and in 1933 bought an airplane he wanted to modify to attempt his own transatlantic flight. He applied for permission for a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, but it was denied because his airplane was deemed unsafe for that long a flight. He kept applying, modifying the plane more each time, but his application kept getting denied.
Finally the authorities, who were probably tired of dealing with him, declared his airplane (named Sunshine) unsafe to fly at all. That was probably overstating it, but records still exist showing how exasperated the officials were getting with Corrigan. Corrigan was getting exasperated too. He re-licensed Sunshine as an experimental plane and got permission for a round-trip flight from California to New York and back. When he landed in New York the plane had developed a fuel leak, but Corrigan’s flight permission was only good for a few days, and he didn’t have time to fix it. So he took off again, on a foggy day.
According to his autobiography, after about 26 hours of flying he noticed that he wasn’t heading toward California at all. He was heading east, on a course to Ireland. Two hours later he landed in Dublin. His flight lasted a bit more than 28 hours, and he had to stay awake the whole time. People who saw his plane were horrified; evidently it looked like a bucket of bolts that wouldn’t make it 5 miles, let alone cross an ocean. The New York Post printed a huge headline in reverse that read “Hail Wrong Way Corrigan.” And “wrong way Corrigan” entered American English; for decades if you thought someone was going about anything in a backwards manner, you might call them a “wrong way Corrigan.”
There are a lot of clues that Corrigan knew exactly what he was doing, and flew to Ireland in spite of not having permission. Some of the people at the airport in New York were very likely in on it too. But Corrigan never admitted his flight was anything but the world’s greatest navigational mistake. He was only lightly reprimanded, and his pilot license was suspended — but only for a couple of weeks. He returned (by ship) to New York where they gave him a ticker tape parade. He met with the US President, endorsed several “wrong way” products (including a wristwatch that ran backward), published his autobiography, and even played himself in the 1939 movie The Flying Irishman.
Corrigan worked as a commercial pilot, then retired in 1950 and bought an orange grove in Santa Ana, California, where the town named a street after him. In 1988, when he was 81, there was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his transatlantic flight and the Sunshine was put back into working order and brought out of its hangar. But the authorities still remembered Corrigan, and they placed guards around the plane to make sure he didn’t climb into it and take off. Corrigan lived to be 88, and the Sunshine is now in an aircraft museum in California. And you might still occasionally hear the phrase “wrong way Corrigan.”
