"Wrong Way" Corrigan
Douglas Corrigan was a mechanic as a young man and worked at Ryan where Charles A. Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego. He wanted to do what Lucky Lindy did and bought a Curtiss Robin. His Robin had a 165 HP Wright Whirlwind R-540 he rebuilt from parts from two used engine.
In 1938 he took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn heading for Los Angeles but landed at Casement Aerodrome in Dublin County on 18 July after a 28-hour, 13-minute flight. His provisions had been just two chocolate bars, two boxes of fig bars and a quart of water. Corrigan's plane had fuel tanks mounted on the front, allowing him to see only out of the sides and also had no radios or navigational equipment like Lindbergh.
Journalist H. R. Knickerbocker reported from Ireland:
"As I looked over it at the Dublin airdrome I really marveled that anyone should have been rash enough even to go in the air with it, much less try to fly the Atlantic. He built it, or rebuilt it, practically as a boy would build a scooter out of a soapbox and a pair of old roller skates. It looked it. The nose of the engine hood was a mass of patches soldered by Corrigan himself into a crazy-quilt design. The door behind which Corrigan crouched for twenty-eight hours was fastened together with a piece of baling wire. The reserve gasoline tanks put together by Corrigan, left him so little room that he had to sit hunched forward with his knees cramped, and not enough window space to see the ground when landing. Despite all this he arrived in good shape.
Corrigan died at 88 in 1995 and kept a up-beat sense of humor throughout his life. "Wrong Way" said his compass was off 180 degrees and he never wavered from his outlandish story.