Wiley Post, the One-Eyed Oklahoma Roughneck, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Flight Around the World That Also Found the Jet Stream

Wiley Post was an Oklahoma oil-field roughneck who lost his left eye in a 1926 drilling accident, then taught himself to fly and, in July 1933, became the first person to fly solo around the world. He completed the trip in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes in his Lockheed Vega, the Winnie Mae. Along the way he pioneered the use of autopilot and radio navigation, discovered the jet stream, and co-designed the first practical pressure suit - the direct ancestor of the modern space suit.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was born in Texas in the fall of 1898 and raised in Oklahoma. He had almost no formal schooling and worked the oil fields as a roughneck - brutal, dangerous, dirty labor. Everything he later became was built out of that grit and stubbornness.

In 1926, while working a drilling job, a chip of metal struck him in the left eye. The infection spread, and doctors removed the eye to save his life. For a young man who dreamed of flying, it was a devastating blow: he had lost his depth perception, the very sense a pilot relies on to judge the last few feet before touchdown.

Most people would have quit. Post did the opposite.

How Did a One-Eyed Man Learn to Fly?

Post received a workman’s compensation settlement for the lost eye - roughly $1,800. He used that money, paid to him for his injury, to buy an airplane.

Then he retrained his own brain. He stared at fence posts, the horizon, and the ground rushing up until he could once again judge distance with a single eye. He later said the injury taught him patience and the discipline to rest - a one-eyed man learns he cannot afford to fly tired. That lesson would prove decisive on his greatest flights.

By the late 1920s, Post was a working pilot, barnstorming and flying charters. Eventually he went to work for a wealthy Oklahoma oilman named F. C. Hall, who owned a remarkable airplane.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

The airplane was a Lockheed Vega - a high-wing monoplane with a molded plywood fuselage, smooth and rounded like a canoe, a big radial engine up front, and no external struts or wires to slow her down. In an era of fabric-and-wire open-cockpit biplanes, the Vega looked like it came from the future. She was fast, strong, and clean.

Hall named this one after his daughter: Winnie Mae. That name is still painted on her nose today.

Flying the Winnie Mae for Hall, Post developed an idea most people would have called crazy. He wanted to fly around the world - and do it faster than anyone ever had.

The First Trip Around the World (1931)

In 1931, Post teamed up with Harold Gatty, an Australian navigator regarded as one of the finest dead-reckoning experts alive. Post would fly; Gatty would find the way. This was long before satellite navigation or modern instrument approaches - they had a compass, charts, a watch, the sun, and Gatty’s mind.

They took off from New York and flew around the top of the world: New York to Newfoundland, across the Atlantic to England, then Germany, Russia, across Siberia, over to Alaska, and back down through Canada to New York - roughly 15,000 miles.

They finished in 8 days and 15 hours. Circling the globe had previously been measured in weeks or months by ship. Two men had just done it in a little over a week in a plywood airplane, enduring Siberian mud fields, fog, and fuel supplies arranged by telegram and hope. They came home to ticker-tape parades and a meeting with the President.

How Did Wiley Post Fly Solo Around the World?

For most people that would have been the capstone. But Post kept asking one question: Could a man do it alone?

A navigator meant a second brain to hold the course while the pilot rested. Remove him, and one man would have to fly the airplane, navigate across the entire planet, and stay awake to do it. It sounded impossible - so Post set out to make it possible, and he did it with technology rather than raw endurance.

He installed one of the earliest Sperry gyroscopic autopilots, a heavy device that could hold the airplane straight and level while he read charts or rested his one good eye. He also fitted a radio direction finder, letting him home in on ground signals instead of relying only on the stars and the map. In 1933, this was cutting-edge - a man betting his life that machines could replace a second human.

In July 1933, Post climbed into the Winnie Mae alone and took off. He finished in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - beating his own two-man record. He napped in the seat while the primitive autopilot held the wings level over Siberia, homed on radio beacons through the murk, and landed exhausted only to refuel and go again.

When he returned to New York, 50,000 people mobbed the field. Wiley Post had become the first human being to fly solo around the world.

How Did Wiley Post Discover the Jet Stream?

The record wasn’t even the most important thing he did. On his long flights, Post noticed that at high altitude the airplane sometimes made far better time over the ground than the engine alone could explain. Something up there was pushing.

Today we call it the jet stream - the rivers of fast-moving air in the flight levels that airline crews ride eastbound and fight westbound. But in the early 1930s, almost no one had flown high enough to confirm it. The air is too thin; a man passes out and the engine starves.

Post wanted to look anyway. The problem: you can’t pressurize a plywood Vega - the airframe would never take it. So he reasoned that if he couldn’t pressurize the airplane, he’d pressurize the man.

Wiley Post and the First Pressure Suit

Post worked with the B. F. Goodrich company to build something the world had never seen: a full-body pressure suit of rubberized fabric with a metal helmet and a small round porthole, fed with oxygen, that could hold pressure around a human body even as the outside air thinned to almost nothing.

Wearing it, he flew the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet - into air so thin and cold it would kill an unprotected person in minutes - and there he found the wind, moving far faster than the airplane. He had flown into one of the great rivers of the sky and returned to tell the world it was real.

That suit is the direct ancestor of every space suit that followed. When you see photographs of astronauts, you are looking at Wiley Post’s idea, grown up - designed by a man who never finished grade school.

The Death of Wiley Post and Will Rogers

Post’s story does not end soft. In the summer of 1935, he built a hybrid airplane from spare parts and fitted it with pontoons to reach remote country. Along for the trip was one of the most beloved men in America: the humorist and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers.

They were flying in Alaska, headed for Point Barrow at the top of the world. The weather was bad and foggy. They set down on a lagoon to ask directions, then took off again. Right after liftoff, the engine quit. Low and slow over the water with no altitude to trade, the airplane nosed over and went in. Both Wiley Post and Will Rogers were killed.

The nation grieved twice over - two beloved men lost in one cold Arctic splash. Post had been staring the odds down since the day a piece of steel took his eye, and he kept flying anyway, because for him the sky was where the questions got answered.

Where Is the Winnie Mae Today?

The Winnie Mae outlived her pilot. Hall sold her to the government not long after the crash, and today she hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington - the same smooth plywood airframe that circled the world twice with a one-eyed man at the controls. Post’s pressure suit, with its rubber body and little round window, is preserved nearby.

We still fly on autopilots he helped prove, ride the jet stream he discovered, and equip our high-altitude crews and astronauts with the descendants of the suit he dreamed up with a tire company.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post (born Texas, 1898) lost his left eye in a 1926 oil-field accident and used the $1,800 settlement to buy his first airplane.
In July 1933, he became the first person to fly solo around the world, finishing in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes in the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae.
He pioneered practical use of the Sperry autopilot and radio direction finding, proving machines could replace a human navigator.
Post discovered the jet stream and, with B. F. Goodrich, built the first practical pressure suit - the forerunner of the modern space suit.
He died alongside humorist Will Rogers in a 1935 plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska; the Winnie Mae and his pressure suit are now displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.