This month marks the 75th anniversary of a very peculiar moment in the history of Baldonnel Aerodrome here in Dublin.

On 18 July 1938, an American aviator by the name of Douglas Corrigan landed in the aerodrome, after a 28 hour flight. This was all particularly unusual as Corrigan had flown off from Brooklyn in New York, supposedly destined for Long Beach, California! Corrigan returned to the United States to massive fanfare in New York City and California, and was honoured with a brilliant New York Post front page, reproduced below.He was only the eleventh person to fly across the Atlantic, and the parade that welcomed him home even surpassed that of Charles Lindbergh.

Douglas Corrigan was born at Galveston in Texas in 1907, the son of a Construction Engineer. In his younger years, he himself worked as a mechanic of the famed Spirit of St.Louis, the plane that his hero Charles Lindbergh would use to make the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris in May 1927. At the time, Corrigan was working at the Ryan Airlines aircraft manufacturing plant in San Diego. Lindbergh’s success and fame had a huge impact on the young Corrigan.

The plane Corrigan used for his incredible flight across the Atlantic in July 1938 was a nine-year-old Curtiss Robin, well below the standard required to fly across the Atlantic. Corrigan had repeatedly sought permission to fly across the Atlantic, but been refused on the grounds that his plane was considered incapable of such a flight. Indeed, Corrigan’s plane was in such a condition that authorities were even reluctant to allow him to fly back to California in it. As Mary Maher noted in an article on the fiftieth anniversary of the flight, it was said at the time that “the pilot had no radio, no parachute, and had overloaded his nine-year-old plane by half a ton. He’d wired himself into the cockpit with a few boxes of chocolate and fig bars, and when he discovered the knob had fallen off the cabin door, he closed it with some more wire hooked around a nail.”

The fact he had requested permission to fly across the Atlantic of course made his story of ‘accidentally’ ending up in Dublin a little suspect. Corrigan claimed that he misread his compass by watching the wrong end of the needle, and therefore headed east instead of west.

Newspaper coverage of Corrigan’s arrival noted that the nine-year-old plane Corrigan arrived in was “tied up with wire” and that “Mr. Corrigan stepped smiling from his machine at Baldonnel and was surrounded by a group of Army air officials, who were entirely mystified by his appearance. He explained what had happened and was taken to the officers’ mess, where he had a meal.”

It was reported that after being questioned by Customs and Army officials at Baldonnel, Corrigan was taken to meet John Cudahy, then the U.S Minister to Ireland. Thanks to Cudahy, Corrigan was also introduced to Eamonn De Valera, then Taoiseach, as well as his two aviation experts John Leyden and John Walsh. Corrigan became something of a celebrity in Dublin, mobbed by autograph hunters in Dublin city centre, and even received by President Hyde at the Áras. This presidential reception attracted huge international media attention, with one American newspaper noting that:

Ireland’s new president honoured America’s new aviation hero by receiving him in Dublin’s imposing presidential palace. Spick and span in new clothes, Douglas C. Corrigan drove from the United States Legation to the palace. There, the 78-year-old President Douglas Hyde and the young Californian animatedly discussed the latter’s amazing flight from New York to Dublin.

Following his flight to Ireland, the United States Bureau of Commerce suspended the experimental airport certificate of Corrigan’s plane, with the intention of keeping him out of the air. It was noted in newspaper reports that Corrigan had joked his next plan was to fly around the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but in the end Corrigan and his plane returned to the U.S by ship. He certainly capitalised on his fame, with an autobiography published within months, as well as endorsing a rather useless watch that ran backwards! Sadly, he became something of a recluse from 1972 onwards when one of his sons perished in a plane clash, but he did publicly mark the fiftieth anniversary of the flight on both sides of the Atlantic.

Returning to Dublin in 1988, he met with some of the army officials who he had encountered at Baldonnel, spoke at Trinity College Dublin and even returned to Clery’s department shop, where he had gone fifty years earlier. Once again, he captivated Dubliners with his story, though many felt not even he believed it!

In 1988, Corrigan talked about his incredible journey on an American news channel: