Warringah Radio Control
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(Incorporated under the Association Incorporation Act 1984)

 Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan
When Charles Lindbergh toured the Ryan Aircraft factory in San Diego he met a young mechanic working on his plane later to be named The Spirit of St. Louis. The young man wiped his hands on his overalls and shook Lindbergh’s hand. The mechanic never forgot that moment— He later said he would not have been more thrilled if he had shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln.
The young man’s name was Douglas Corrigan, and from the moment Lindbergh completed his trans-Atlantic journey it became Corrigan’s dream to retrace the flight. In 1933 Corrigan bought a used Curtiss Robin for S325 and spent all his spare time repairing and improving it—a slow process. He obtained a used Whirlwind engine and fastened some of the electronic instruments together and onto the instrument panel of the plane with tape and wire. He flew his plane around Los Angeles, where it became known as the “Corrigan Clipper” In 1937, having outfitted the plane with fuel tanks that, as with Lindy’s plane, limited his forward view, he applied to the Department of Commerce for a license to attempt a trans-Atlantic flight.
The inspector took one look at the plane and told Corrigan the most he would do is grant him a license to fly from Los Angeles to New York, and he would permit him to fly back to Los Angeles only if he made the trip nonstop. Corrigan told some friends in Los Angeles that he did not see how the inspector would know if he landed some where between Los Angeles and New York: in the mid-1930s, there was no way to check on whether a plane made an emergency or unscheduled stop at a small airfield along the way.
Corrigan later admitted that the thought also occurred to him that the authorities had no way of knowing where he was heading at the time he took off. After arriving in New York and obtaining the license for the return trip, Corrigan bid the Department of Commerce inspector “Bon Voyage,” and took off on the evening of July 16, 1938. Corrigan’s plane was spotted heading over the Atlantic about an hour later. Landing in Ireland the next day, he claimed that his compass had malfunctioned and fog had prevented him from taking a visual reading. Corrigan was given the name “Wrong Way,” though nearly no one believed his story.
Upon his return to America,”Wrong-Way” Corrigan was greeted as a hero. More than a million people  lined New York’s Broadway for a ticker-tape parade honoring the man who had flown in the face of authority.
He was made an honorary member of the Wisconsin Liars’ Club and wrote an autobiography, That’s My Story, in which he stuck to his story about flying across the Atlantic by mistake. He starred as himself in a film, The Flying Irishman, again presenting his “official version,” but clearly with tongue in cheek. Corrigan earned quite a sum from all these activities—he even sold the plane to the San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition—and bought an orange farm, where he stepped out of the spotlight.

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