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Charles Augustus Lindbergh II (February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974) was a pioneering United States aviator famous for piloting the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.
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NewsJuly 17, 1938: 'Wrong Way' Corrigan Gets It Right
1938: Douglas Corrigan claims his place in the annals of aviation history when he "mistakenly" flies from New York to Ireland. With a single flight, Corrigan breaks the law, charms the Irish, becomes an American hero and earns an unforgettable nickname.
According to the flight plan he filed beforehand, his destination was California. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't: Corrigan had wanted to fly to Ireland all along, hoping to emulate Charles Lindbergh's solo trans-Atlantic flight of a decade earlier. But the Bureau of Air Commerce denied the request, on the grounds that Corrigan's plane -- a rather well-used Curtiss Robin OX-5 monoplane -- was too unstable for a long flight over water.
Like other early aviators, Douglas Corrigan was drawn to flying at an early age. While still a teenager, he took a paid ride aboard a Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny," and once bitten with the bug, there was nothing else to do but fly. Within a week Corrigan was taking lessons, and he made his first solo flight in 1926, still younger than 20.
Offered a job as an aircraft mechanic with Ryan Aeronautical Company, Corrigan moved to the firm's San Diego factory and wound up on the team that built Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. In fact, it was Corrigan who pulled the chocks away from the plane as Lindbergh prepared to take off for New York, and history.
Lindbergh's epic solo flight left a lasting impression on young Corrigan, who resolved to make a similar flight. He bought the Robin, used, in 1933 and spent a couple of years modifying the plane, trying to get it rated airworthy enough for certification. He never did, and at one point officials in California grounded the rattling bucket of bolts -- which Corrigan had named Sunshine -- for six months.
Finally, in 1938, he was ready. Armed with a conditional permit, Corrigan flew to New York. He took off in the early-morning fog of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 17, ostensibly bound for California. This is where things get a bit murky.
Corrigan steadfastly maintained, with a twinkle in his eye, that he was indeed intending to fly to California but was compelled to take off to the east because of the weather, and got turned around owing to a balky compass on board. He said he didn't discover his navigational error until he was 26 hours into the flight, a claim that lifted more than a few eyebrows.
The thing is, Sunshine really was a crate. It was patched up and lashed together and, worse, during the California-New York flight had developed a gas leak that Corrigan decided he didn't have time to repair. Gasoline actually leaked into the cockpit while the plane was over the Atlantic. Corrigan solved that problem by using a screwdriver to punch a hole in the cockpit floor.
So, after a flight of 28 hours, 13 minutes, Corrigan reached Baldonnel Airfield in Dublin in a plane that was structurally unsound, leaking fuel, lacking a reliable compass and equipped with reserve fuel tanks mounted in such a way that they blocked his straight-ahead view.
Corrigan received a warm welcome in Ireland and was taken to Dublin town, where he met Prime Minister Eamon de Valera, as well as eager reporters. The Irish were particularly tickled by Corrigan's assertion that his faulty compass was to blame for the wrong-way flight, and the American press wasted no time in nicknaming him "Wrong Way" Corrigan.
"Wrong Way" and his junk pile of a plane were eventually bundled aboard the liner Manhattan and shipped home, where he received a ticker-tape parade that drew a bigger crowd than turned out for Lindbergh in 1927. Interview followed interview, and Corrigan doggedly stuck to his story, basically: "I got turned around up there and wound up flying east."
Everybody figured Corrigan was pulling a fast one, including President Franklin Roosevelt, who later told him, smilingly, that he believed every word of Corrigan's story.
No doubt some aviation authorities would have loved sticking it to their wayward pilot, but Corrigan's goofy feat had so captured the national imagination -- he received congratulatory telegrams from a number of prominent Americans, including Henry Ford and Howard Hughes -- that the best they could do was a 14-day suspension of his license. Case closed.
Source: History.net
Published: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:00:00 GMT - Source: Wired.Com - Read the articleNewsJuly 2, 1937: Earhart Vanishes Over the Pacific
1937: At 8:43 a.m. local time, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, steaming off Howland Island, receives this faint transmission from Amelia Earhart: "KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you -- but gas is running low?."
She vanishes along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, into the Central Pacific, and they're never heard from again.
The disappearance of the celebrated flier remains perhaps the most tantalizing unsolved mystery in aviation history. In the age of Charles Lindbergh and other daredevil fliers, Amelia Earhart became a household name in 1928, after becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. True, it was as a passenger with a male pilot and copilot, but she soloed across the Atlantic in 1932.
Although fellow pilots rated her as no better than competent, Earhart parlayed her sex and her absolute devotion to flying into a celebrity that few of her contemporaries enjoyed. And it's not like she wasn't legit: Earhart was the first pilot of either sex to successfully fly solo from Honolulu to the U.S. mainland, reaching Oakland, California, on Jan. 11, 1935. She wrote voluminously about her experiences and worked hard to promote aviation, both to women and to the public at large.
By 1937, though, the 39-year-old Earhart was weary of both the celebrity and the flying. Saying she had one last good flight in her, she was determined to make it a doozy: She would fly her specially modified Lockheed L-10E Electra completely around the world.
A first attempt, flying westward from Oakland in March, ended either with a blown tire or pilot error as she was taking off from Honolulu. The plane was badly damaged and shipped back to Lockheed in Los Angeles for repairs.
For the second attempt, Earhart was joined by Noonan. They altered the flight plan for an eastward journey to compensate for shifting weather patterns, and left Oakland on May 21. From Miami, their route took them south along the eastern seaboard of South America, then a hop across the Atlantic Narrows to Africa. They skirted the southern coast of Asia, crossing the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Australia before arriving in Lae, New Guinea, June 29. They had flown roughly 22,000 miles at this stage and had another 7,000 to go, all of it over the Pacific Ocean.
As they left Lae on July 2, the cutter Itasca was already on station off Howland Island, Earhart's next destination, to help guide the plane in. Ship-to-plane radio contact was established, but something -- possibly problems with the radio directional finder aboard the Electra -- undermined communications.
Whatever the reason, Noonan was unable to pick up the Itasca's homing signals. Itasca even raised steam for a possible visual sighting, but the aviators were unable to locate either the cutter or Howland Island. Seventy-five minutes after receiving Earhart's last transmission, which included the line, "We are on the line 157/337," the Itasca began searching for the plane.
Such was Earhart's stature that President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched nine U.S. Navy ships and 66 aircraft to help in a search that proved fruitless.
Nevertheless, various stations around the Pacific reported receiving unidentified signals, leading to the hope that Earhart and Noonan had somehow managed to find land somewhere. None of these reports amounted to anything.
Over the years the mystery only deepened, leading to some pretty fanciful theories concerning Earhart's fate, including the possibility that she was captured by the Japanese during World War II and forced to broadcast propaganda to American GIs as Tokyo Rose. Iva Toguri and all the others who broadcast as Rose should have been so lucky.
The likeliest explanation for what became of Earhart and Noonan is the logical one: They ran out of fuel, ditched at sea and drowned. They were officially declared dead Jan. 5, 1939.
As for Earhart herself, she knew she was taking a big risk for high stakes:
"Please know I am quite aware of the hazards.... I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others."
Source: Various
Published: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:00:00 GMT - Source: Wired.Com - Read the article
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