Wrong Way Corrigan – Ingliando

On this day, the Irish-American aviator, Douglas Corrigan, touched down in Ireland in a patched-up, customised 1929 monoplane, having flown non-stop and single-handed across the Atlantic from New York in just over 28 hours. Corrigan was not the first person to perform this feat, but his flight became famous because it was self-financed and totally unauthorised as he should have flown in a westward direction back to California. Corrigan claimed the mistake was due to a navigational error, caused by heavy cloud cover that obscured landmarks, but he was a skilled aviator and it is generally believed that his ‘mistake’ was deliberate since he had constantly been denied permission to make a transatlantic crossing. The press were quick to nickname him “Wrong Way Corrigan” and when he and his plane returned to New York on the steamship Manhattan, he was greeted with great celebration.