For the last few years, a small group of us (including several folks from this community) gather in a local park for lunch and some 'show and tell' every week. Representing a fairly wide collecting diversity, one member of the group also has family ties to the famous aviator 'Wrong Way Corrigan'. Harry is the son of 'Douglas Wrong Way Corrigan' and recently gifted us with a piece of his father's famous plane (shown below) which made the Transatlantic trip.
For those who might not know his story, Douglas Corrigan was nicknamed "Wrong Way" in 1938 after a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York City. Ever since he had been a mechanic for Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, Douglas had dreamed of making a Transatlantic flight himself. But authorities were not impressed with his plane and due to Amelia Earhart's disappearance the year before they were not favoring the approvals of dangerous ocean crossing flights.
Douglas filed a flight plan to fly back to Long Beach, California on the morning of July 17, 1938 and took off from New York at 5:15AM. After takeoff in low light and foggy conditions, Douglas claimed he misread his compass and headed east instead of west and landed in Dublin Ireland some 26 hours later. For a great full accounting of this man and his famous flight see this link
https://www.historynet.com/the-adve...corrigan.htm
Note the 'NX' designation on the plane. Back in the day, 'N' was for a US plane and the second letter indicated the aircraft's airworthiness category; "C" for standard, "R" for restricted, "X" for experimental. As planes aged and their condition lessened, the inspectors would drop the designation to 'X'.
I've assembled the Wrong Way Corrigan items shown above and placed them in a presentation folder.
Don
Posted 10/16/2021 06:08 am
