When the little monoplane bumped to a stop at Baldonnel Aerodrome outside Dublin on the morning of 18 July 1938, the ground crew did not quite know what they were looking at. The aircraft was a patchwork of solder and baling wire. The door was held shut by a twist of fence wire. And out of it, unfolding himself after twenty-eight hours hunched over a leaking fuel tank, climbed a lean, grinning American who looked around at the green Irish fields, blinked, and reportedly said the most famous wrong thing in aviation history.

"Just got in from New York," he announced. "Where am I?"

His name was Douglas Corrigan. He had taken off from Brooklyn the previous morning, filed to fly west to California. He had landed in Ireland. And he was about to become, almost overnight, one of the most beloved characters the age of flight ever produced.

The mechanic who helped build a legend

Corrigan was no weekend flier who had wandered off course. Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1907, he caught the flying bug young and went to work for the Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego. There, in 1927, a young Corrigan helped build one of the most famous aircraft ever made: he worked on the wing and fuel tanks of Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, and was among those who saw it off on its journey toward history.

Watching Lindbergh conquer the Atlantic lit something in Corrigan that never went out. He decided he would do it too — and he chose Ireland, the land of his ancestors, as his goal. The only thing standing in his way, it turned out, would be the United States government.

Archival 1938 footage of “Wrong Way” Corrigan after his flight to Ireland.

A jalopy with ocean-crossing ambitions

In 1933 Corrigan bought a used 1929 Curtiss Robin monoplane and began, in his off hours, to turn the gentle little cross-country plane into something that might survive a transatlantic crossing. He rebuilt and uprated the engine and crammed in extra fuel tanks until he could barely see straight ahead.

The journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, who inspected the aircraft in Dublin, never forgot the sight of it.

From 1935 onward Corrigan applied again and again for permission to fly nonstop from New York to Ireland. Again and again he was refused: his rebuilt Robin was deemed unsound for an ocean crossing, certified only for cross-country hops. By 1937 officials had grown so wary that they refused to renew the aircraft's full licence. The dream looked dead on the ground.

The “wrong” turn over Brooklyn

On 9 July 1938 Corrigan flew his Robin from California to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. His paperwork said he would refuel and fly straight back west. At dawn on 17 July, Corrigan lifted off, pointed his nose obediently westward for the benefit of the few onlookers — then banked around, slipped into a cloudbank, and kept right on going east, out over the open Atlantic.

He later swore he simply misread his twenty-year-old compass in the gloom. He had no radio. His view forward was blocked by fuel tanks. When his feet went cold hours in, he discovered the cockpit floor awash with leaking gasoline and punched a hole in it with a screwdriver to let the fumes drain away. Twenty-eight hours and thirteen minutes after leaving Brooklyn, he set down in Dublin.

A hero's welcome — and a wink from the law

The authorities did not believe the compass story for a second. They sent him a lengthy telegram listing every regulation he had broken, and then handed down their thunderbolt of a punishment: a fourteen-day suspension of his pilot's licence.

By the time Corrigan and his crated Robin steamed back into New York aboard the liner Manhattan, the suspension had conveniently expired — and the country had fallen head over heels for him. A Depression-weary public adored the cheeky underdog who had thumbed his nose at the rules and gotten away with it. New York gave him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway that drew enormous crowds. He met President Roosevelt, wrote a bestselling autobiography titled — what else — That's My Story, and even endorsed a wristwatch that ran backwards.

HistoryPod revisits 18 July 1938 — the day Corrigan landed in Dublin instead of California.

He stuck to his story to the very end

Was it really a navigational error? Almost nobody thought so then, and nobody thinks so now. He had spent years trying to fly to Ireland, built a plane for exactly that purpose, and been refused at every turn. The "wrong way" was, in all likelihood, precisely the way he meant to go.

But here is the most charming part of all: Douglas Corrigan never once admitted it. For the next fifty-seven years, through fame, films and old age, he kept a perfectly straight face. When he died in 1995 at the age of eighty-eight, he was still insisting he had simply taken a wrong turn over Brooklyn. Some pilots are remembered for getting everywhere exactly right. Corrigan is remembered, and loved, for getting it gloriously, deliberately, unrepentantly wrong.

Sources: Wikipedia (Douglas Corrigan); HISTORY.com; AOPA; H. R. Knickerbocker, “Is Tomorrow Hitler’s?” (1941).