Question: What Texas-born aviator famously claimed to have flown from New York to Ireland by mistake in 1938?
Answer: Douglas Corrigan. Born in Galveston in 1907, Corrigan dropped out of high school and went to work as an aircraft mechanic for the San Diego company that built Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, in which he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Corrigan hoped to duplicate the feat, and he purchased a Curtiss Robin monoplane that he modified to fly from New York to Ireland. Although Corrigan’s plane was approved for cross-country flight, his application to fly to Ireland was rejected. Undeterred, on July 17, 1938, he took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, and landed in Dublin over 28 hours later, claiming to have made a navigational error. Corrigan’s license was briefly suspended, and he became known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.”
