Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae - The One-Eyed Pilot Who Flew Around the World Alone

Wiley Post lost his left eye in an Oklahoma oil field accident in 1926 and walked away with $1,800 in workers’ compensation. He used that money to take flying lessons. Within a decade he had flown around the world twice, pioneered the practical use of an autopilot on a solo long-distance flight, and built a pressure suit that became the direct ancestor of equipment worn by astronauts. Few careers in aviation history compressed so much achievement into so little time.

How Wiley Post Learned to Fly With One Eye

Before the accident, Post had already been close to aviation. He had worked as a parachute jumper for a barnstormer outfit, standing on the wings of biplanes at county fairs. He understood flight from the outside. The workers’ compensation money gave him the chance to learn it from the cockpit.

The missing eye created a genuine challenge. Depth perception is real, and landing an airplane depends on it. Post built new mental reference points - judging distance by how the runway filled his windshield and how the horizon line moved. He adapted through practice, the same way pilots work through most problems: by doing it until the skill was built.

He earned his license and began flying charter work, eventually catching the attention of F.C. Hall, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who hired Post as his personal pilot. Hall owned the airplane that would make Post famous.

What Made the Lockheed Vega “Winnie Mae” Special

The aircraft was a Lockheed Vega, named after Hall’s daughter: the Winnie Mae. By the standards of the late 1920s, it was a radical machine. The fuselage was molded from two halves of Sitka spruce, glued together like a hollowed-out log - no external bracing, no drag-inducing wire rigging. Just a clean wooden monocoque tube with a cowled radial engine up front and an enclosed cockpit behind it.

Most aircraft of the era were fabric-and-wire frameworks. The Vega was aerodynamically clean, light, and fast. It looked ahead of its time because it was. In 1930, Post entered the Winnie Mae in the National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago - a transcontinental sprint. He won.

The 1931 Around-the-World Flight: Post and Gatty Break the Record

Winning the race put Post on the map. What he planned next put him in the history books.

In 1931, Post proposed flying around the world. He brought a navigator: Harold Gatty, an Australian who was among the finest aerial navigators of his era. The Winnie Mae carried only basic instruments - compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator, engine gauges - so Gatty’s skill with charts and celestial navigation was essential.

They departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931 - the same airstrip Charles Lindbergh had left from four years earlier. The route crossed the North Atlantic into England, through Europe, across the Soviet Union, and over Siberia. Fuel had to be pre-positioned weeks in advance. Weather forecasting in 1931 bore little resemblance to what pilots rely on today. Post and Gatty flew through it anyway.

Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes after leaving Long Island, they landed back at Roosevelt Field. The previous record, set by the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin, had been 21 days. Post and Gatty cut it to eight. They received a ticker tape parade in New York, keys to the city, and a meeting with President Hoover.

How Wiley Post Flew Around the World Alone in 1933

Post immediately began planning to do it again - without a navigator.

Flying solo meant managing navigation himself for the entire route, which required a way to hold heading for hours without constant hand-flying. The Sperry Corporation had been developing gyroscopic autopilot systems, and Post acquired one of their early units, had it installed in the Winnie Mae, and learned its behavior before trusting it over open ocean. This was among the first practical uses of an autopilot to complete a long-distance solo flight.

The system wasn’t perfect - it drifted and needed regular correction - but it gave Post enough margin to check charts, eat, and steal brief periods of rest while the aircraft held its heading over Siberia or the Bering Sea.

Post departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 15, 1933. The flight was harder than the first. He battled nausea and exhaustion over Asia, landing at remote Soviet airstrips where he communicated by drawing pictures in the dirt and pointing at fuel drums. He crossed the Bering Strait, traversed Alaska and Canada, then dropped south into the American heartland.

Seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes after takeoff, Wiley Post had flown around the world alone.

Did Wiley Post Discover the Jet Stream?

During both circumnavigations, Post noticed something he could not fully explain. At high altitude, the Winnie Mae sometimes moved faster than the math should have allowed. The winds up there were stronger, consistent, and directional in a way that felt like a structural feature of the upper atmosphere rather than ordinary weather.

What Post was observing from the cockpit of a wooden airplane at the edge of its ceiling was what we now call the jet stream - a river of high-velocity wind circling the globe between roughly 20,000 and 40,000 feet. Nobody had a formal scientific understanding of it in 1933. Post had identified it empirically, the way pilots find most things: by being up there and paying attention. Every airline crew today either uses or fights the jet stream on every transcontinental flight.

He wanted to study those winds properly, which meant flying at the altitudes where they were strongest - and that required solving a problem nobody had solved before.

The Pressure Suit That Led to Space Exploration

Air at 40,000 feet will kill an unprotected person in minutes. The Winnie Mae’s cockpit was open to ambient pressure. If Post was going to fly at extreme altitude for any useful duration, he needed a pressurized suit.

He approached the B.F. Goodrich Company and described what he needed: a sealed garment that would maintain pressure around his body at extreme altitude. It took three attempts to build a working prototype. The first ballooned so severely at altitude that Post couldn’t move his arms. The third version, built in a shop in Akron, Ohio, was heavy and cumbersome - but it worked.

Post flew the Winnie Mae to altitudes never reached by a propeller-driven aircraft. The data he recorded contributed to the foundation that later researchers and meteorologists used to formally identify and chart the jet stream. That third-prototype pressure suit is the direct ancestor of the suits worn by high-altitude reconnaissance pilots, X-15 pilots, and the first American astronauts. The line from an oil field accident in Oklahoma to the space program is shorter and more direct than most people realize.

The Winnie Mae now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

Post died on August 15, 1935, at Point Barrow, Alaska. He was 36 years old.

He had been flying with Will Rogers, the comedian and radio personality, on an exploratory trip through the Alaskan bush. The aircraft was not the Winnie Mae. It was a modified hybrid - a Lockheed Orion fitted with oversized pontoon floats, an improvised machine Post had assembled for the trip. Those floats made the aircraft nose-heavy and unstable at low speed, a problem that wasn’t fully appreciated before departure.

They set down on a small lake near Point Barrow to ask directions from a group of Inupiat hunters - they were lost. Then they took off again. The engine quit almost immediately after liftoff. The nose went down into shallow water. Rogers was killed on impact. Post died shortly after.

The Inupiat hunters recovered both bodies. One of them then ran 12 miles overland to the nearest signal station to send word to the outside world - there was no other way. The double loss hit the country hard. Rogers had been one of the most beloved Americans of his generation, and Post was a national hero. The news, carried within hours by radio, felt like something had gone wrong with the world.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post lost his left eye in a 1926 oil field accident and used his $1,800 workers’ compensation settlement to fund flying lessons, launching one of the most consequential careers in aviation history.
Post and navigator Harold Gatty flew around the world in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes in 1931, cutting the previous record of 21 days - set by the Graf Zeppelin - by more than half.
Post completed the first solo around-the-world flight in 1933 in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, relying on one of the first practical autopilot systems ever used in long-distance flight.
Flying at extreme altitude during these missions, Post empirically identified what we now call the jet stream - before the scientific community had formally described or charted it.
The pressure suit Post commissioned from B.F. Goodrich is the direct ancestor of astronaut pressure suits, making him a foundational figure not just in aviation but in the history of human spaceflight.