Fifty-nine years ago today, on the morning of July 17th, 1938, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic called Douglas Corrigan took off from an airfield in New York in a nine-year-old single-engined Curtiss Robin monoplane.
He had filed a flight-plan for a non-stop journey to Los Angeles, but 27 hours later he landed instead at Baldonnel Aerodrome in Ireland. His voyage earned him a place in aviation history as the variously incompetent, or devious, "Wrong-Way" Corrigan.
Some years previously Corrigan had worked on the preparation of Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and made no secret of his wish to emulate the latter's great achievement. He seemed resigned, however, to the intransigence of the American authorities, who opposed non-stop solo flights across the ocean on the understandable grounds that the risks involved were unacceptable.
Then, on July 8th, 1938, Corrigan departed Long Beach, California, for New York on what he claimed would be a round-trip flight. He landed at Roosevelt Field on July 9th, and on 17th departed on what was assumed to be the return journey to Los Angeles.
According to himself, once in the air Corrigan misread his compass by observing the wrong end of the needle, and therefore headed east instead of west. He blamed the weather for compounding his mistake: for almost half the journey thick cloud obscured his view, both above and below, and he had no way of taking bearings from landmarks or the sun.
By the time he realised he was well out over the Atlantic, it was too late to turn.
His version is supported by the fact that he neither sought nor was given any weather information for the North Atlantic, but received a full briefing on the route to California. Moreover, the only map he carried related to the westward route, and he carried no passport or related documents of any kind.
The aviation authorities, however, were convinced that they were duped by Corrigan, and that he really intended to fly the Atlantic all the time. Their rebuke, probably because of his acquired celebrity, was relatively mild: his pilot's license was suspended for the duration of his voyage home by ship.
But even on his 80th birthday a few years ago, Douglas Corrigan refused to change his version of the events that led to his enigmatic landing at Baldonnel. Indeed his answer on that occasion to the perennial question has a strangely topical relevance about it:
"The only story I know is the one I've been telling all the time. I've told it so many times I'm beginning to believe it myself. Why should I change it now?"