Stunt

While Howard Hughes's great ship was being tuned and stocked at Floyd Bennett Field fortnight ago (see above), a thin broth of a lad named Corrigan poked down out of the air at neighboring Roosevelt Field in a 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane with an old Wright J-6 motor that could turn up only 95 miles an hour. By modern standards the ship was a crate, but in it, with nothing to fly by but a compass, a bit of a map and the beam in his eye, 31-year-old Douglas P. Corrigan of Los Angeles had flown the 2,700 miles to New York nonstop. A vacation trip, he said, and a fairly pleasant one, from his job at the Northrop Corp. aircraft works at Inglewood, Calif.

The ship was one he had bought for $900 at an auction six years ago. Extra fuel tanks he had installed forward of the pilot's seat, obscuring his vision so that to see where he was going he had to wiggle the ship, peer out the side windows. Expense of the trip had been $110.15--$110 for gas and oil, ten cents for chocolate bars and, for a water bottle he borrowed at Long Beach, a nickel deposit. That, of course, would be returned to him when he brought the bottle back.

Early one day this week, when the chatter about the Hughes flight had dwindled to tabloid speculation over when where or whether Howard Hughes would wed Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn, off again was Corrigan, his crate loaded with 320 gallons of gasoline, apparently headed for home to get his nickel back. But instead of heading West, the blind nose of his old ship aimed East, picked up the Lindbergh trail. Year before he had applied for permission to attempt an ocean night, but the Bureau of Air Commerce cracking down on stunt flying, refused it.

But all night long no one on North America saw tail or strut of Douglas Corrigan. Then, some 27 hours later, an American plane was spotted streaking past Belfast like a Sinn Feiner ducking the Black and Tans. It was Corrigan, all right, and an hour later he fluttered down at Baldonnel Airport near Dublin.

"I've just flown from New York " he remarked with a grin. "By the way, where am I?" Dubliners told him. "My," said Corrigan, "and I thought it was California all the time."

Incredible was the bare-faced yarn Corrigan told: "I left New York to return to Los Angeles, but by an unfortunate mistake I set my compass wrong, and when I got up above the clouds the visibility was very bad* When I had flown 25 hours I came down through the clouds and I was in Ireland."

Technically under detention for landing on Irish soil without a passport, Gone Again Corrigan was this week as free as wire. And in Washington, where B. A. C. Chief Denis Mulligan was expected to decree some penalty for the outlaw flight there was a twinkling hint that whatever Corrigan had done was all right with Mulligan. Said Mr. Mulligan: "It's a great day in the history of the Irish people and we don't want to spoil their fun by talking about punishment."

* At 6,000 feet, "icing" started. Corripan de-iced his wings with a 15-foot rug-pole he kept handy for just that purpose.

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