July 19

On this date in 1938 Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan landed at Baldonnel Airfield, Dublin, Ireland 28 hours and 13 minutes after having left Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York. Corrigan’s filed flight plan had him taking a course from Brooklyn to California in the United States. This is the flight that gave Corrigan the sobriquet ‘Wrong way Corrigan’ because he claimed to have gotten lost after leaving Floyd Bennett Field. Considering Corrigan’s extensive experience as an aviator (He had worked on the design of Charles Lindberg’s Spirit of St. Louis) and the repeated failure of aviation authorities to approve his application for approval of his flight plan to take his experimental aircraft to Ireland, it seems fairly obvious that Wrong Way Corrigan knew precisely what he was doing and exactly where he was going.