Wiley Post, the One-Eyed Oklahoma Roughneck Who Flew the Winnie Mae Solo Around the World and Then Built a Rubber Suit to Touch the Stratosphere

Wiley Post was a one-eyed Oklahoma oil-field worker with a seventh-grade education who, in July 1933, became the first pilot to fly solo around the world, completing the trip in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. He did it in a wooden-bodied Lockheed Vega called the Winnie Mae, using an experimental autopilot he nicknamed “Mechanical Mike.” He later built one of the world’s first practical pressure suits and helped prove the existence of the jet stream - innovations that still shape how airliners and astronauts fly today.

From Cotton Farm to Cockpit

Wiley Post was born on a cotton farm near Grand Saline, Texas, and grew up moving around Oklahoma as his family chased work. He had little use for school but a natural ear for machines, especially engines. He could listen to a motor run and diagnose exactly what was wrong with it - a skill that would later save his life.

Before flying, Post worked the oil fields and even served a short stretch in reform school. While working as a roughneck on a drilling rig, a piece of flying metal struck him in the left eye, and he lost it permanently.

How Did a One-Eyed Man Learn to Fly?

Post used the $1,800 the oil company paid him in settlement for his lost eye to buy his first airplane. In an era when two good eyes were considered essential for flying, losing one should have grounded him for good - depth perception is exactly what a pilot needs to judge the final feet of a landing flare.

So Post taught himself. He would stare at fence posts and telephone poles, gauging the distances between them over and over, training his brain to build depth perception out of experience and memory. He learned to read the size of objects, the way the ground rose up, and the fall of shadows.

Eventually he could land an airplane more smoothly with one eye than most pilots could with two. He wore a white eye patch over the empty socket for the rest of his life, and it became his trademark.

The Winnie Mae and the Lockheed Vega

Post went to work as a personal pilot for wealthy Oklahoma oilman F.C. Hall, who owned a Lockheed Vega. The Vega was a high-wing monoplane with a fuselage of molded plywood, laminated in a concrete mold like a canoe - smooth and clean, with no external struts or bracing wires. Up front sat a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine producing roughly 450 horsepower.

In an age of open-cockpit biplanes, the Vega looked like it had arrived from the future. Hall named the airplane the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

In 1930, Post flew the Winnie Mae to victory in the National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago. Then, in 1931, he and navigator Harold Gatty flew the Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days and about 15 hours, earning a ticker-tape parade in New York City and a handshake at the White House.

Flying Around the World Alone

The record with Gatty wasn’t enough. Critics whispered that Post had merely been the driver while Gatty did the real work of navigating. So Post resolved to circle the globe again - this time completely alone.

Flying solo meant no one to hold the controls while he read a chart, no one to relieve him so he could rest, and no coast-to-coast weather picture. One tired man over oceans, mountains, and Siberian tundra, where falling asleep meant death. Post prepared with two innovations that point straight at modern aviation:

The Sperry gyroscopic autopilot. This experimental unit used spinning gyroscopes to detect when the airplane drifted off heading or dropped a wing, then worked small servos to correct the controls. Post called it “Mechanical Mike,” and it held the Winnie Mae straight and level while he worked his charts or grabbed a few minutes of rest.
Deliberate fatigue management. In the weeks before the flight, Post intentionally scrambled his own sleep and eating schedule so his body could be ready to fly at any hour, defeating jet lag and irregular landing times. It was single-pilot fatigue management in 1933 - decades before it appeared in any training manual.

The 1933 Solo Flight

Post took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn in July 1933, heading east across the Atlantic. His route carried him to Berlin and then across thousands of miles of the Soviet Union, hopping from one remote airfield to the next.

Near Flat, Alaska, he landed hard and nosed the Winnie Mae into soft ground, bending the propeller into the dirt. Here his machinist’s skill proved decisive: instead of waiting for a rescue that wasn’t coming, Post got out, straightened the bent propeller by hand, cleared the mud, and flew on.

He landed back at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933, where 50,000 people mobbed the field. He had flown around the entire world alone in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - knocking nearly a full day off the record he had set with Gatty two years earlier.

Reaching for the Stratosphere

Post’s next obsession was altitude. He suspected that high in the thin air there were rivers of fast-moving wind that could push an airplane to speeds no one had seen. Today we call these currents the jet stream, but in 1934 almost no one believed they existed.

The problem: the Winnie Mae was a plywood shell and could not be pressurized. Above roughly 40,000 feet, the air is so thin that a person loses consciousness within seconds and their blood would effectively boil.

So Post worked with the B.F. Goodrich company and an engineer to build what amounted to the world’s first workable pressure suit - not a pressurized cabin, but a pressurized man. It was a sealed suit of rubberized fabric, pumped up with oxygen and pressure, topped with a rigid aluminum-and-plastic helmet fitted with a small porthole for his one good eye.

The early versions were nearly impossible to move in, split at the seams under pressure, and in one case had to be cut off him. But Post kept refining it until he had a suit he could actually fly in. Wearing it, he climbed the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet, rode the high-altitude winds, and recorded ground speeds far beyond what his engine’s horsepower could explain. He had found the jet stream.

Why Wiley Post Still Matters

That homemade rubber suit is the direct ancestor of the pressure suits worn by Chuck Yeager, by U-2 reconnaissance pilots, and by Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon. And Post’s conviction about those high, fast winds is why airline captains today file eastbound flight plans that ride the jet stream to save time and fuel.

He didn’t just fly around the world - he drew the map for how all of us would eventually fly: high, fast, and up where the air can’t keep a person alive without help.

The Final Flight

In August 1935, Post was in Alaska with his close friend, humorist and film star Will Rogers - at the time one of the most beloved men in America. They were flying a hybrid floatplane Post had assembled, which some observers felt was nose-heavy. After setting down on a lagoon near Point Barrow to ask directions, they took off again, and the engine quit at low altitude. The airplane nosed in, and both men were killed.

The nation grieved the loss of two of its brightest figures in a single afternoon. But the Winnie Mae outlived its pilot. The plywood Lockheed Vega hangs today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., with Post’s pressure suit and its distinctive porthole helmet displayed nearby.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post was the first person to fly solo around the world, landing back in Brooklyn on July 22, 1933, after 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes.
He lost his left eye in an oil-field accident and taught himself depth perception by studying fence posts and poles, buying his first airplane with the $1,800 eye-injury settlement.
His solo flight relied on the Sperry “Mechanical Mike” autopilot and a deliberately scrambled sleep schedule - an early form of single-pilot fatigue management.
Post co-developed one of the first practical pressure suits and helped prove the existence of the jet stream, directly influencing later high-altitude and spaceflight suits.
Post died in a 1935 plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside humorist Will Rogers; the Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.