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

Wiley Post was a one-eyed Oklahoma oil-field worker who became the first person to fly solo around the world in 1933 and helped build the world’s first practical pressure suit. He traded a workman’s compensation settlement for his first airplane, retrained his brain to judge depth with a single eye, and pioneered high-altitude flight in the jet stream decades before it entered common use. His innovations are the direct ancestor of the flight suits worn by test pilots and astronauts.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was born in 1898 on a cotton farm in Texas, and his family moved into Oklahoma while he was a boy. It was hardscrabble country — red dirt and shimmering heat. He quit school after the sixth grade and went to work, because that’s what poor kids did.

But Post was restless. He’d seen an airplane once at a county fair — a flimsy thing of wood and wire buzzing over the crowd — and something in him never came back down to earth.

Airplanes cost money he didn’t have, so he took the most dangerous work available: roughnecking on the oil rigs. He also took a wrong turn, getting mixed up in a robbery that earned him a little over a year in the Oklahoma State Reformatory. By his own account, he came out focused and done wasting time.

How Did Wiley Post Lose His Eye — and Get His First Plane?

In 1926, on his first day on a new drilling job, a chip of metal flew off a hammered bolt and struck Post in the left eye. Infection set in, and doctors had to remove the eye entirely.

For a man who dreamed only of flying, losing the depth perception a pilot supposedly can’t live without should have ended the dream. Instead, Post treated it as a down payment.

The accident came with a workman’s compensation settlement of about $1,800. Rather than build a safe life on the ground, Post spent nearly every cent on an airplane. He then spent months retraining himself — staring at objects, judging their distance, then walking it off to check his accuracy. He taught his own brain to land a plane with one eye, and got so good that two-eyed pilots couldn’t match him.

The Winnie Mae and the Lockheed Vega

Post flew the barnstorming circuit — wing-walking shows, crop work, anything that paid — before becoming personal pilot to a wealthy Oklahoma oilman named F.C. Hall. Hall owned a beautiful Lockheed Vega, a high-wing monoplane with a smooth, fat plywood fuselage shaped like a teardrop.

Hall named the plane after his daughter: the Winnie Mae.

That name would live forever in aviation history, though few people realize it began as a rich man’s daughter’s name painted on a company airplane.

How Did Wiley Post Fly Around the World?

At the time, the record for circling the globe belonged to the German airship Graf Zeppelin at 21 days. Post believed an airplane could cut that in half.

In 1931, he and navigator Harold Gatty flew the Winnie Mae across the Atlantic — England, Germany, the empty expanse of the Soviet Union where they hauled the plane out of muddy fields by hand, and on into Alaska, where Post ground-looped and bent a propeller they straightened with a rock and a wrench.

They finished in 8 days, 15 hours, and came home to ticker-tape parades and a handshake from the President.

The First Solo Flight Around the World

Post wasn’t satisfied, because he’d relied on a navigator — a crutch, to his mind. So in 1933 he flew the same plane, the same route, alone.

To do it, he leaned on two pieces of brand-new technology:

An autopilot — a primitive gyroscope-driven device he nicknamed “the mechanical Mike” — that held the plane steady while he fought to stay awake.
A radio direction finder to help him hold a course.

He survived on catnaps, tying a wrench to one finger so that if he dozed too deeply, the falling wrench would yank him awake. He finished in 7 days, 18 hours, beating his own record by a full day. No human being had ever flown solo around the world before. Wiley Post was the first.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream and Invented the Pressure Suit

Flying the Winnie Mae higher and higher, Post noticed that at extreme altitude the air was thin but the winds were ferocious — and often blowing in his favor. He had found the jet stream, the high river of air that fast aircraft ride today. He understood, before almost anyone, that the future of flight was up high where thin air couldn’t slow you down.

The problem: humans can’t breathe up there, and the Winnie Mae’s plywood hull couldn’t be pressurized without splitting like an egg. So Post reasoned that if he couldn’t pressurize the airplane, he’d pressurize the pilot.

Working with B.F. Goodrich engineer Russell Colley, he built the world’s first practical pressure suit — layers of rubber and rubberized fabric with a riveted helmet and a single round porthole for his good eye. Pumped full of pressurized oxygen, the suit let Post climb to 50,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft and set unofficial altitude records in the stratosphere.

That homemade rubber suit is the direct ancestor of every high-altitude flight suit that followed — the ones worn by Chuck Yeager chasing the sound barrier and by the astronauts who walked on the moon.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

By 1935, Post had a new project: a hybrid aircraft built from a Lockheed Orion fuselage and Explorer wings, fitted with pontoons, to scout an air-mail route through Alaska toward Siberia. Coming along was his famous friend, the beloved cowboy humorist Will Rogers.

In August 1935, low on certainty about their position, the two set down on a lagoon near Point Barrow at the top of the world to ask local Inupiat hunters for directions. Just after lifting off the water again, the engine quit. At low altitude the nose-heavy hybrid stalled, fell into the water, and came apart.

Both men were killed instantly. Wiley Post was 36 years old. A nation that had two heroes in one airplane lost them both in a single afternoon, and the country went into mourning.

Why Wiley Post Still Matters

By every measure the world hands out — money, schooling, two good eyes — Post had no right to become what he became. Yet he became the first to fly solo around the world, the father of the pressure suit, and one of the first humans to ride the high-altitude winds that airliners cruise on today.

Every time a jet sits at 38,000 feet riding a tailwind, cabin comfortably pressurized while the outside air would kill in seconds, it’s flying on ground that a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck mapped first. The Smithsonian preserves the Winnie Mae on display to this day, along with photographs of that homemade pressure suit.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post lost his left eye in a 1926 oil-field accident and used the $1,800 settlement to buy his first airplane, then retrained himself to fly with one eye.
In 1933 he became the first person to fly solo around the world, finishing in 7 days, 18 hours using an early autopilot and radio direction finder.
He discovered the practical value of the jet stream and, with B.F. Goodrich engineer Russell Colley, built the first practical pressure suit, reaching 50,000 feet.
His pressure suit is the direct ancestor of the suits worn by Chuck Yeager and the Apollo astronauts.
Post died in a 1935 plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside humorist Will Rogers, at age 36.