Wiley Post and the one-eyed pilot who flew around the world alone

Wiley Post lost his left eye in an oil field accident in 1926, used the workers’ compensation money to buy his first airplane, and went on to become the first person to fly solo around the world. Along the way, he built the first practical pressure suit, discovered the jet stream through firsthand experience, and advanced autopilot technology — all before his death at age 36.

From Cotton Fields to Cockpits

Wiley Post was born November 22, 1898, on a farm near Grand Plain, Texas. His family moved across the Oklahoma and Texas frontier, and Post was the fourth of six children. School didn’t hold his attention. Machines did.

He saw his first airplane at a county fair around 1913, just ten years after Kitty Hawk. What caught his attention wasn’t the spectacle — it was the engine. That mechanical instinct would shape everything that followed.

Post spent his late teens and early twenties working as a roughneck in the Oklahoma oil fields. The work was dangerous and poorly paid, but it funded flight lessons and built a fearlessness around heavy machinery that most people never develop. He took his first flight instruction around 1924 and soloed quickly. The airplane made sense to him the way engines always had.

How Did Wiley Post Fly With One Eye?

In 1926, a metal chip flew off a sledgehammer on an oil rig and struck Post in the left eye. He lost it completely. At twenty-seven, the man who wanted nothing more than to fly was suddenly seeing the world through a single lens.

Post used his $1,800 workers’ compensation settlement to buy his first airplane. Rather than mourn his lost depth perception, he taught himself to fly without it. Landing an airplane demands precise height judgment in the final feet above the runway. Post relearned that entire skill set using monocular cues — shadows, the relative size of ground objects, and the rate at which runway markings grew in his one good eye.

He didn’t just become competent. He became one of the best pilots in the world.

The Winnie Mae and the Rise to Fame

By 1928, Post had caught the attention of F.C. Hall, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who hired him as a personal pilot. Hall bought a Lockheed Vega, a high-wing monoplane with a plywood fuselage and one of the fastest airframes of its era. They named her the Winnie Mae, after Hall’s daughter.

Post’s first major victory came in 1930 when he won the National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago, beating a field of pilots who had every physical advantage over him. The aviation world took notice of the Oklahoma roughneck with a glass eye and a borrowed airplane who was faster than everybody.

Flying Around the World in Eight Days

In June 1931, Post and navigator Harold Gatty departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island — the same field Lindbergh had left from four years earlier. Their goal was to break the around-the-world speed record of roughly 21 days, set by the Graf Zeppelin in 1929.

The Winnie Mae carried extra fuel tanks crammed into every available space. The cockpit was cramped, loud, and reeked of avgas. They had no pressurization, limited instruments, and a compass of questionable reliability. What they did have was a Sperry autopilot, one of the earliest ever installed in a civilian aircraft, and Gatty, one of the finest aerial navigators alive.

They flew east through England, Germany, and across the Soviet Union. Crossing Siberia in 1931 meant unreliable maps, nonexistent weather reporting, and muddy strips carved out of wilderness where fuel had been pre-positioned by rail — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Post flew through rain, fog, and grinding headwinds. At one stop, the Winnie Mae’s landing gear sank into soft ground and nearly flipped the airplane. Post dug her out by hand.

They crossed the Bering Sea to Alaska, then south through Canada, and touched down at Roosevelt Field on July 1, 1931. Eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes. They had cut the world record nearly in half. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade.

The First Solo Flight Around the World

Post wasn’t satisfied. Gatty had been in the cockpit with him, and Post wanted to prove one man alone could circle the globe.

For two years, he focused on two things. First, he modified and refined the Sperry autopilot until it could hold the Winnie Mae on course for hours while he slept. He rigged an alarm that would sound if the airplane deviated beyond set parameters — a buzzer to jolt him awake. In 1933, relying on an autopilot to cross oceans solo was considered borderline insane.

On July 15, 1933, Post took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. One eye. One engine. One modified autopilot. Alone.

The solo flight was harder than the trip with Gatty. Over the Atlantic, Post later said his exhaustion was so severe he hallucinated. The autopilot kept the Winnie Mae flying while he drifted in and out of consciousness. Over Siberia, he hit fog, rain, and unmarked strips. At one point he landed in a flat field and sank into mud up to the Winnie Mae’s belly. Local villagers helped pull the airplane free.

Crossing the Bering Sea, he nearly overflew Alaska entirely. His compass was unreliable and he had no navigator. He spotted Flat, Alaska — a tiny mining town — through a break in the clouds and landed for fuel and sleep.

On July 22, 1933, Post landed back at Floyd Bennett Field. Seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes. He had beaten his own record by twenty-one hours and become the first person to fly solo around the world.

Photographs from that day show a man who appeared to have aged a decade in a week — bloodshot eye, shaking hands, barely able to stand. But he had done what no human being had ever done.

The Pressure Suit That Led to the Space Program

Post had become convinced that the future of long-distance aviation lay in the upper atmosphere. He believed that flying above 25,000 to 30,000 feet would unlock stronger tailwinds and thinner air, allowing greater speed on less fuel. He was right — he had intuited the jet stream decades before meteorologists fully mapped it.

The problem was survival. At 30,000 feet, a person loses consciousness in minutes without supplemental oxygen, and even with it, cold and low pressure would eventually be fatal. No aircraft of the era had pressurized cabins.

So Post partnered with the B.F. Goodrich Company to design and build what became the world’s first practical pressure suit. It was a rubberized fabric suit with a round aluminum helmet, stiff joints that barely allowed movement, and pressurization from a liquid oxygen system in the cockpit.

The first version failed. The second split open during testing. The third held pressure. Post wore it on a series of high-altitude flights over the Midwest in 1934, reaching altitudes above 40,000 feet — something no one had achieved in an unpressurized aircraft. Every astronaut who has ever worn a spacesuit owes a debt to Wiley Post and that Goodrich suit.

The Tragic Final Flight

In August 1935, Post and humorist Will Rogers were flying through Alaska in a hybrid aircraft Post had assembled — a Lockheed Orion airframe fitted with Sirius pontoons. The combination made the airplane nose-heavy and difficult to handle on water.

On August 15, 1935, they took off from a lagoon near Point Barrow, the northernmost point in Alaska. The engine quit shortly after takeoff. The airplane nosed over into shallow water. Both men were killed instantly.

Wiley Post was thirty-six years old.

What Wiley Post’s Legacy Means for Aviation

In a remarkably compressed life, Post’s contributions were staggering:

He flew around the world twice — once with a navigator in record time, once completely alone
He built the first practical pressure suit, directly pioneering technology that led to the space program
He discovered the jet stream through practical experimentation
He advanced autopilot technology in ways that shaped every long-distance flight afterward
He did all of it with one eye, one engine, and a wooden airplane

The Winnie Mae is displayed today at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post lost his left eye in 1926 and used the compensation money to buy his first airplane, teaching himself to fly with monocular vision
He set the around-the-world record twice — in 8 days 15 hours with navigator Harold Gatty (1931), then solo in 7 days 18 hours (1933)
Post built the first practical pressure suit with B.F. Goodrich, reaching above 40,000 feet and laying groundwork for the space program
He effectively discovered the jet stream through high-altitude experimentation before meteorologists fully understood it
He was killed at age 36 alongside Will Rogers in a crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, in August 1935