On July 17, 1938, at 5:15 in the morning, Douglas Corrigan took off from
Brooklyn for a nonstop solo flight to Los Angeles. The few people who
were on hand were baffled when they saw the 31 year-old aviator turn into a
cloud bank and disappear to the east. According to his flight plan, he
was supposed to be heading west.
Twenty eight hours and thirteen minutes later, Corrigan touched down in Dublin, Ireland. “I’m Douglas Corrigan,” he announced to a startled group of airport workers, “Just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California.”
Corrigan claimed a faulty compass, but it turned out authorities had repeatedly turned down his requests to make a trans-Atlantic flight. They thought his modified 1929 Curtiss-Robin was unsafe. So they didn’t buy his story of a bad compass. They sent him a six hundred word telegram detailing all the regulations he had violated and proceeded to suspend his license.
As it turned out, Corrigan spent the entire suspension at sea, bringing his crated plane back to New York Harbor aboard a liner. The ship docked on August 4, and the next day an estimated one million New Yorkers lined lower Broadway for a ticker-tape parade.
Six other pilots had made solo flights across the Atlantic following Lindberg’s famous flight in 1927. They included Amelia Earhart and Wylie Post. But “Wrong Way Corrigan” had clearly struck a chord. As columnist Robert Thomas would later put it, “That was partly because he was seen as an engaging and impish young pilot who had boldly thumbed his nose at authority, then baldly denied it, and partly because he had made the flight not in a state-of-the-art aircraft with cutting-edge instruments, but in a rickety plane so precariously patched together that it was variously dubbed an airborne crate and flying jalopy.”
Twenty eight hours and thirteen minutes later, Corrigan touched down in Dublin, Ireland. “I’m Douglas Corrigan,” he announced to a startled group of airport workers, “Just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California.”
Corrigan claimed a faulty compass, but it turned out authorities had repeatedly turned down his requests to make a trans-Atlantic flight. They thought his modified 1929 Curtiss-Robin was unsafe. So they didn’t buy his story of a bad compass. They sent him a six hundred word telegram detailing all the regulations he had violated and proceeded to suspend his license.
As it turned out, Corrigan spent the entire suspension at sea, bringing his crated plane back to New York Harbor aboard a liner. The ship docked on August 4, and the next day an estimated one million New Yorkers lined lower Broadway for a ticker-tape parade.
Six other pilots had made solo flights across the Atlantic following Lindberg’s famous flight in 1927. They included Amelia Earhart and Wylie Post. But “Wrong Way Corrigan” had clearly struck a chord. As columnist Robert Thomas would later put it, “That was partly because he was seen as an engaging and impish young pilot who had boldly thumbed his nose at authority, then baldly denied it, and partly because he had made the flight not in a state-of-the-art aircraft with cutting-edge instruments, but in a rickety plane so precariously patched together that it was variously dubbed an airborne crate and flying jalopy.”
Corrigan became famous for going the wrong way which was really the right way to get where he wanted to go. Some believe that we Christians are going the wrong way. They think that if you really want to get somewhere then you need to be focused on getting ahead; on things like power, prestige and wealth. We Christians have a different perspective. Our highest values include such qualities as charity, compassion, love and service. It is not that these things are mutually exclusive. The issue, rather, is what you value most, and whether you are going the right way or the wrong way ultimately depends (just as it did for Corrigan) on where you want to go. What we Christians have found is that following Jesus’ “wrong way” actually takes us into the fullest, richest and most beautiful life that we could ever imagine. Far from going the wrong way, Jesus actually got it exactly right.
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”(Mt. 7:13-14).
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