Wrong Way Corrigan life and biography

Douglas Corrigan was an American aviator born in Galveston, Texas. He was nicknamed "Wrong Way" in 1938. After a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York, he flew from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, to Ireland, though his flight plan was filed to return to Long Beach. He claimed his unauthorized flight was due to a navigational error, caused by heavy cloud cover that obscured landmarks and low-light conditions, causing him to misread his compass.

On 17 July 1938, Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett airfield in a tiny single-engine plane. Corrigan had filed a flight plan for California, but 29 hours later he arrived in Ireland, claiming his compasses had failed and that he had accidentally flown the wrong way. Although Corrigan never quite admitted it, his 'mistake' was surely a ruse to circumvent aviation authorities who had turned down his request to make a trans-Atlantic flight. Corrigan's stunt caught the public fancy; he was given a hero's welcome on his return to New York, and "Wrong-Way Corrigan" became a popular nickname for anyone who made a big blunder or did things backwards. Corrigan published his biography, That's My Story, in 1938.

Corrigan played himself in the 1938 movie The Flying Irishman.

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