Wiley Post and the one-eyed Oklahoma barnstormer who flew around the world and invented the pressure suit

Wiley Hardeman Post—a one-eyed, self-taught pilot from rural Oklahoma—completed the first solo flight around the world in 1933, pioneered stratospheric aviation, and co-developed the first practical pressure suit, laying the groundwork for every flight suit and space suit that followed. He accomplished all of it before the age of thirty-seven, when he died in a crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside humorist Will Rogers.

From Cotton Farms to Flying Circuses

Post was born in 1898 on a cotton farm near Grand Saline, Texas. His family relocated to Oklahoma during his childhood, and money was always scarce. Formal education was limited, but Post was mechanically gifted and driven.

His first encounter with an airplane came at a county fair, where a barnstormer passed through town. The experience fixed his trajectory, though the path to a cockpit would be anything but direct.

In 1924, Post joined Burrell Tibbs and his Texas Topnotch Fliers, a flying circus. His role wasn’t in the pilot’s seat—he was a parachute jumper, completing ninety-nine jumps before saving enough money to begin flight training. Instructors recognized his natural ability almost immediately.

Losing an Eye, Buying an Airplane

In 1926, a metal fragment struck Post’s left eye during an oil field job. Doctors removed the eye entirely. He was twenty-six years old.

Rather than abandoning aviation, Post used his $1,800 insurance settlement to buy an airplane. He obtained a waiver from the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce to fly with one eye and soon landed a position as personal pilot for F.C. Hall, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman.

Hall owned a Lockheed Vega—a high-wing monoplane with a plywood fuselage and a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine. He named it the Winnie Mae, after his daughter. That aircraft would become one of the most famous airplanes in history.

Winning the National Air Race

In 1930, Post entered the National Air Race Derby from Los Angeles to Chicago. He won, beating every competitor across two thousand miles in a borrowed Vega. It was a statement performance, but for Post, it was just the beginning.

Around the World in Eight Days

In 1931, Post and Australian navigator Harold Gatty set out to circumnavigate the globe and break the existing record of twenty-one days, held by the Graf Zeppelin.

They departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931—the same field Lindbergh had left from four years earlier. Their route took them east across the Atlantic to England, through Germany, across the Soviet Union and Siberia, through Alaska and Canada, and back to New York.

Eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes. They beat the Zeppelin’s record by more than twelve days in a single-engine airplane. The achievement earned a ticker-tape parade in New York and national celebrity.

The First Solo Flight Around the World

Post wasn’t satisfied. The navigator bothered him. He wanted to prove the flight could be done alone.

In 1933, he did exactly that, equipped with a critical new technology: a Sperry autopilot, one of the first installed in a small aircraft. He called it “Mechanical Mike.”

On July 15, 1933, Post departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes later, he landed back where he started, completing the first solo circumnavigation by aircraft—and beating his own previous record.

The conditions were extraordinary by modern standards. No GPS, no weather radar, no satellite communication, and only primitive radio. Post navigated by dead reckoning, compass, and celestial observation. He landed on gravel strips in Siberia, changed his own oil, slept in the cockpit between legs, and nearly died over Alaska when the autopilot failed during a rainstorm.

Fifty thousand people were waiting when he landed in Brooklyn.

Discovering the Jet Stream and Inventing the Pressure Suit

Post’s ambitions shifted upward. He became convinced that the future of long-distance aviation lay in the stratosphere, above 30,000 feet, where thin air and powerful winds could dramatically increase speed and range.

Flying the Winnie Mae at altitude, Post documented tailwinds exceeding one hundred miles per hour—among the earliest observations of what we now call the jet stream. He recognized that high-altitude flight could deliver greater speed and fuel efficiency, but the problem was survival. The Winnie Mae wasn’t pressurized. No small aircraft was in 1934.

Post partnered with the B.F. Goodrich Company in Los Angeles to build a solution. After two failed prototypes, the third pressure suit worked. It was a rubberized fabric suit with a sealed helmet, wrist-attached gloves, and a liquid oxygen breathing system.

Post flew the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet multiple times, recording groundspeeds above 340 miles per hour with jet stream assistance—in a fabric-covered airplane built in 1927.

The Direct Line to Space Suits

That pressure suit’s legacy extends far beyond Post’s lifetime. When NASA engineers began designing suits for the Mercury program in the early 1960s, they studied the work Post and B.F. Goodrich had done three decades earlier. The lineage from Post’s suit to the Apollo space suits is direct and well-documented.

The Winnie Mae and the original pressure suit are both on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer.

The Crash at Point Barrow

In August 1935, Post was exploring a potential air route from the West Coast to Russia. He and Will Rogers were flying together through Alaska in a hybrid aircraft Post had assembled—a Lockheed Orion fuselage fitted with Explorer floats. The configuration was nose-heavy, and the pontoons shifted the center of gravity dangerously forward.

On takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow (now Utqiagvik), Alaska’s northernmost point, the engine quit at approximately fifteen feet. The aircraft nosed over into the shallow water.

Both men were killed instantly. Wiley Post was thirty-six years old.

An Inupiat man named Clair Okpeaha ran fifteen miles to Point Barrow to send a telegraph. President Roosevelt issued a statement within hours. A memorial now stands at the crash site.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world in 1933, navigating with dead reckoning and a primitive autopilot in seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes.
He was among the first to document the jet stream, recording tailwinds over 100 mph during stratospheric flights above 40,000 feet.
The pressure suit Post developed with B.F. Goodrich in 1934 is the direct ancestor of modern flight suits and NASA space suits.
Post accomplished all of this with one eye, having lost his left eye in an oil field accident in 1926 and used the insurance money to buy his first airplane.
He died at age thirty-six in a crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside Will Rogers, while scouting an air route to Russia.