The Winnie Mae, Wiley Post's Lockheed Vega, and the One-Eyed Oilfield Worker Who Circled the Globe Alone and Discovered the Jet Stream Before Anyone Knew What to Call It

Wiley Post flew the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae around the world twice in the early 1930s - first with a navigator in 1931, then alone in 1933 - and in the process identified the phenomenon we now call the jet stream. A one-eyed oilfield worker who spent his accident settlement on flying lessons, Post also pioneered the pressure suit that became the direct engineering ancestor of every space suit that followed. He died at 36, largely overshadowed in life and death by more famous contemporaries. The aircraft that carried him around the planet hangs today in the Smithsonian’s Milestones of Flight gallery, a few yards from the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer.

The Wooden Airplane That Belonged to That Company

The Winnie Mae is 18 feet long with a plywood monocoque fuselage shaped like an elongated teardrop. She is, by every reasonable measure, small. That she hangs in the Smithsonian alongside the two most iconic aircraft in American aviation history is the most efficient summary of her significance anyone has yet produced.

Jack Northrop designed the Lockheed Vega in the late 1920s while at Lockheed, and it was unlike anything else in the sky at the time. A cantilever monoplane - no external bracing wires, no struts between wing and fuselage. The fuselage was formed from strips of spruce and plywood laid over a mold, smooth and purposeful. A high, thick wing above for lift. Fixed undercarriage below. And a Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial engine up front producing 450 horsepower, which in 1929 was a considerable amount of persuasion. Amelia Earhart would fly a Vega on her solo transatlantic crossing in 1932. Post would take his considerably further.

From the Oil Patch to the Cockpit

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in Grand Plain, Texas in 1898 and grew up working Oklahoma oil fields. In 1926, a drilling accident took his right eye. A cable snapped, fragments flew, and the oil company settled with him for $1,800.

Post spent that money on flying lessons.

The depth perception problem that would concern any flight instructor, Post solved through experience and calculation - reading distance through angles and spatial relationships the way a one-eyed man learns to navigate the physical world. By 1928 he was flying charter work across Oklahoma and Texas, building a reputation for precision, thorough preparation, and getting where he said he was going.

F.C. Hall, an Oklahoma oil man, bought a Vega in 1929 and named it after his daughter: the Winnie Mae. Hall hired Post to fly it. Over the next two years, Post came to know that aircraft the way certain pilots come to know a particular airframe - not just its performance numbers and systems, but its actual personality. When Hall eventually sold him the Winnie Mae for $2,500, Post understood every mood and mannerism in the airframe.

The First Circumnavigation: Eight Days with Harold Gatty

In the spring of 1931, Post decided to fly her around the world. For this first attempt he brought a navigator - Harold Gatty, a young Australian with a reputation as one of the finest aerial navigators in aviation at the time.

The route: New York to England, across Europe into the Soviet Union, the breadth of Siberia, across the Pacific to Alaska, and back across North America. Approximately 15,500 miles, weather permitting.

They departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931.

The Soviet legs were the hardest. Muddy airstrips cut from the forest. Fuel arriving in drums, pumped by hand. Sleep measured in hours that never added up to enough. Gatty navigated by chart, dead reckoning, and chronometer. Post flew on instruments and the particular stubbornness of a man who has already decided how the story ends.

Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes after leaving Roosevelt Field, they landed back on Long Island. Fifty thousand people were waiting. Previous circumnavigation records had been measured in weeks. The world took notice.

The Solo Flight: Around the Planet Alone

Within two years, Post was working on the next problem: doing it alone.

No navigator. No Gatty. Just Post and the Winnie Mae and fifteen thousand miles of ocean and continent.

He spent two years preparing. He reached an agreement with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to install an early autopilot - what Post called the “mechanical man.” By modern standards it was crude, a gyroscopically stabilized device that held wings level and approximated heading, that argued with turbulence and demanded constant correction. By 1933 standards, it was a miracle. It meant Post could sleep.

Not for long. He rigged a string from his left wrist to the top of his head. If he nodded off too far, the weight of his head pulling forward would tug the string and wake him. Low-tech solution to a high-stakes problem - a recurring theme in Post’s career.

On July 15, 1933, Post climbed into the Winnie Mae alone at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, ran up the Wasp, and pointed her toward Berlin.

Seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes later, he was back. The first solo circumnavigation of the globe was complete. One man, one engine, fifteen thousand miles of planet, twenty-minute catnaps over Siberia on a string tied to his wrist.

The River of Wind Nobody Had Named Yet

On both circumnavigation attempts, Post’s instruments had registered something they couldn’t fully explain. At extreme altitude - somewhere around 30,000 feet and higher - he had encountered winds of extraordinary speed. Not turbulence. Not a weather front. A steady, powerful horizontal current moving at velocities no meteorological chart of the era described or predicted. He had felt the Winnie Mae pushed and accelerated in a way the engine alone didn’t account for.

He wanted to go back up there and understand what he was flying through.

The problem was nearly fatal. Above 25,000 feet, atmospheric pressure drops to the point where a human being cannot survive without assistance. The partial pressure of oxygen falls below what the lungs can use. Hypoxia sets in, and the pilot makes bad decisions, and then no decisions, and the aircraft goes where it wants.

Post needed a pressure suit.

The Pressure Suit and Its Descendants

He approached the B.F. Goodrich Company. They built him a suit. The material tore under pressurization. They built a second. It held pressure but ballooned so severely around Post’s hands that he couldn’t reach the controls. The third suit worked - a rigid helmet, a pressurized inner layer of rubberized fabric, an external shell that held its shape under pressure without becoming unwearable. Getting into it required a ground crew and a deliberate process. It weighed about 15 pounds and restricted movement in ways that made every control input a conscious act.

Beginning in 1934, Post flew a series of high-altitude research flights in the Winnie Mae from the California coast eastbound, trying to map and exploit those upper-level winds. The Wasp was good for around 200 miles per hour in level flight under normal conditions. What the ground speed indicators showed on these high-altitude legs was considerably beyond that.

He was flying inside a river of wind.

Post documented it, reported it, and pushed it into the meteorological literature. The phenomenon wouldn’t get a proper name for another decade. B-29 Superfortress crews flying combat missions over Japan from the Mariana Islands during World War II discovered that at altitude over the Pacific they could be at full power and barely making headway westbound, while the same altitude eastbound practically pushed them home. Military researchers eventually named it: the jet stream.

Wiley Post had felt it first, in a wooden airplane, over the American West, wearing a rubber suit that made him look like something out of Jules Verne.

The pressure suit work proved equally durable. The three suits developed with B.F. Goodrich established the engineering principles that every full-pressure suit since has built upon - the suit Chuck Yeager wore in the Bell X-1 when the sound barrier broke, the suits Mercury astronauts wore before becoming the first Americans in space, the pressure garments worn on Gemini and Apollo. All of them descend, in concept and engineering logic, from what Post and B.F. Goodrich worked out in the mid-1930s.

Point Barrow, August 1935

On the morning of August 15, 1935, Post was at a lagoon near the village of Walakpa, about 15 miles from Point Barrow, Alaska. He was traveling with Will Rogers - humorist, radio personality, and social commentator who was at that point one of the most beloved public voices in America. They were planning an exploratory flight northward toward the Soviet Union.

Post was flying a hybrid aircraft assembled from parts of several different Lockheed airframes, fitted with large Edo floats for water operations. Some pilots who saw it had quiet reservations about the floats and the weight distribution. The aircraft was heavier on the nose than anyone preferred.

Shortly after takeoff from the lagoon, the engine quit. They were low and slow. The nose went down and the aircraft did not recover.

Both men died on impact. Post was 36 years old.

The death of Will Rogers struck the country like a physical blow. The grief was national and genuine. Post stood in his passenger’s shadow in death, as he had stood in the shadow of Lindbergh and others during his life. But the pilots knew what Post had accomplished in the Winnie Mae, what it had cost him, and what it meant for everyone who came after.

The Winnie Mae at the Smithsonian

The Winnie Mae was donated to the Smithsonian shortly after Post’s death by those who understood the aircraft had crossed the line from personal property into public heritage. She has been in Washington ever since.

She hangs today in the Milestones of Flight gallery at the National Air and Space Museum, suspended alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer - three aircraft that together define what the first half-century of powered flight was about.

She is smaller than you expect. The plywood has the amber tone of very old wood. The Pratt and Whitney Wasp is still on the nose, exactly as it was when Post throttled up at Floyd Bennett Field in July of 1933 and pointed her east, alone. The exhaust staining on the cowling is visible. The wear is honest.

She has been somewhere. Several somewheres. Around the planet twice. Into the jet stream. Up to the altitude where human beings stop working without mechanical help. All of it in plywood and spruce, flown by an oilfield roughneck who spent his accident insurance on flying lessons and decided that the entire planet was a reasonable cross-country destination.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post flew the wooden Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes in 1931 with navigator Harold Gatty, then completed the first solo circumnavigation in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes in 1933.
• Post lost his right eye in a 1926 drilling accident and used the $1,800 settlement to fund his flying lessons.
• His high-altitude research flights beginning in 1934 were the first documented encounters with what would later be named the jet stream, detected a decade before the scientific community formally identified it.
• The three pressure suits Post developed with B.F. Goodrich established the foundational engineering principles for every subsequent full-pressure suit, including those worn by Chuck Yeager, Mercury astronauts, and Apollo crews.
• Post was killed on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside Will Rogers. He was 36 years old.