In 1938, a pilot took off from Brooklyn with a flight plan for California. Twenty-eight hours later he landed in Ireland. He blamed his compass. He kept blaming it for fifty-seven years.

His name was Douglas Corrigan, a broke aircraft mechanic from Galveston, Texas. In 1927, at the Ryan factory in San Diego, he helped build the Spirit of Saint Louis, the plane Lindbergh flew to Paris. Corrigan assembled the wing. He installed the fuel tanks. Then he watched Lindbergh become the most famous man alive, and decided he would fly an ocean of his own. He bought a used Curtiss Robin for three hundred and ten dollars, rebuilt it with second hand parts, and asked Washington for permission to fly to Ireland. The inspectors took one look and said no. He modified it and applied again. No. Year after year, no. By 1937 they refused to even renew its license. Too unstable to fly.

In July 1938 he flew that unstable plane nonstop from California to New York, landing with a fuel leak he chose not to fix. On July 17th, cleared to fly home to Long Beach, he took off at quarter past five, climbed into the haze, and turned east, out over the Atlantic. He had no radio. His compass was twenty years old. The extra fuel tanks blocked the windshield so completely he could only see out the sides. His food for the crossing was two chocolate bars, two boxes of fig bars, and a quart of water. Ten hours in, gasoline was sloshing around his feet, so he punched a hole through the cockpit floor with a screwdriver to drain it away from the hot exhaust, and kept flying. A full day after takeoff, he rolled to a stop at an army airfield outside Dublin, climbed out, and asked: Just got in from New York. Where am I?

He told the Irish officers he had gotten mixed up in the clouds and followed the wrong end of the compass needle. Nobody believed a word of it. The punishment for crossing an ocean without permission: a fourteen day suspension, which was precisely the length of the boat ride home. Over a million New Yorkers gave him a bigger ticker tape parade than Lindbergh got. A newspaper printed its front page headline backwards in his honor. Hollywood paid him seventy-five thousand dollars to play himself. And he never cracked. Not at the fiftieth anniversary. Not once in fifty-seven years. He died in 1995, still blaming the compass.

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