Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the First Solo Circumnavigation of the Globe

Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - covering approximately 15,500 miles alone in a single-engine aircraft. Then, having already rewritten the record books twice, he turned his attention to high-altitude research that would eventually reshape the design of every pressurized aircraft in existence. The story of how a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck got there is the part most aviation histories skip.

From Oil Fields to Cockpit

Post was born in 1898 in the Texas Panhandle and grew up in Oklahoma. He left school after the eighth grade and spent his early years as a farm hand, roughneck, and field mechanic. He discovered aviation watching barnstormers at county fairs and began parachuting at airshows to earn money while learning to fly.

In 1926, he was back on a drilling rig in Oklahoma when a piece of metal broke off a drill head and struck him in the left eye. He lost the eye entirely. The workers’ compensation settlement came through at $1,800. He used every cent of it to buy his first airplane.

The Winnie Mae and the First Record

An Oklahoma oilman named F.C. Hall had watched Post fly and hired him as his personal pilot. Hall purchased a Lockheed Vega - a high-wing monoplane with a wooden monocoque fuselage and a Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine - and named it after his daughter: the Winnie Mae.

In 1931, Post proposed an around-the-world flight. With navigator Harold Gatty, he departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931, flying west across Canada and Alaska, over to Siberia, across Russia, through Europe, and back across the North Atlantic to New York.

Their time: 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes.

The previous record had been set by the Graf Zeppelin airship at 21 days. Post and Gatty cut it by more than half in a single-engine propeller aircraft. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade. They had dinner at the White House.

How Post Flew Around the World Alone in 1933

Two years later, Post wanted to fly the same route without a navigator.

Flying solo in 1933 meant every navigational decision fell on him - dead reckoning, pilotage, and working an E6B flight computer by hand across thousands of miles of open ocean and Siberian wilderness. No GPS. No one to hand off the controls during the long over-water legs.

His answer was the Sperry Gyropilot, one of the earliest practical autopilots. Post didn’t treat it as a convenience - he treated it as a crew member. He would set the Winnie Mae in cruise, engage the Gyropilot, and take short intervals of sleep in the cockpit. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Then he would check position, correct heading, assess fuel, and rest again. In practice, he was inventing the method of human-machine paired long-distance flight: shifting workload to automation to extend what a single pilot could physically sustain.

Post departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 15, 1933, flying north and west into Canada, across Alaska, over the Bering Sea into Siberia, then west across Russia, through Germany, and back down the Atlantic coast.

The Siberian Propeller Incident

Russia in 1933 was not a straightforward transit country for American aviators. Post had filed his route and obtained permissions, but Soviet bureaucracy at remote airfields operated independently of what had been cleared in Moscow.

One airfield had suffered flood damage to its runway - information that never reached Post. He landed long, groundlooped, and bent the propeller in the middle of Siberia. A replacement had to be located, transported out, and installed. Post waited, worked the problem methodically, and kept going.

His final time: 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes. The first solo circumnavigation of the globe.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

On the high-altitude legs over Siberia and the North Atlantic, Post noticed the Winnie Mae was covering ground at rates the engine output and indicated airspeed couldn’t explain. The winds aloft were doing something unusual at altitude - something nobody had formally documented.

What Post was flying through was what we now call the jet stream. He didn’t have the vocabulary to name it, but he recognized it as real and useful, and he decided to study it deliberately.

The problem: the altitudes where those winds concentrated - 30,000 to 50,000 feet - were far above what any pilot could survive without pressurization. In the early 1930s, practical cruising altitudes topped out around 12,000 to 15,000 feet before oxygen became critical. No aircraft had a pressurized cabin.

Building the First Pressure Suit

In 1934, Post went to the B.F. Goodrich Company and asked them to build a full-body pressure suit. There was no prior art to work from - no template, no existing industry around the concept. He was asking them to create a wearable pressurization system capable of sustaining a pilot at 50,000 feet.

The first suit failed at operating pressure: it became too rigid to move in. Post couldn’t work the controls.

They built a second. Still not workable.

The third suit functioned well enough to fly.

By 1935, Post was making high-altitude research flights in the modified Winnie Mae wearing that suit, reaching altitudes around 40,000 feet - higher than any propeller-driven aircraft had previously reached. On those flights, he deliberately flew into and documented the anomalous winds he had first noticed two years earlier. The data he recorded became foundational material for the meteorological and flight-planning research that eventually mapped the jet stream as a usable atmospheric feature.

Why This Matters for Every Pilot Flying Today

The lineage runs directly forward.

Every pressurized aircraft cabin - from a Boeing 737 to a Cessna Citation to any military jet with a pressurized cockpit - follows the engineering logic Post was working out in 1934 and 1935. The B.F. Goodrich pressure suit program was the seed of the entire field.

The jet stream work carries an equally direct legacy. Every transatlantic and cross-country route that adjusts track to ride or avoid those high-altitude winds. Every weather briefing that treats jet stream positioning as a fuel burn factor. Every flight plan routed for a tailwind at cruise altitude. Post was the first person to observe and document those winds from inside an aircraft.

He was working roughly 60 years ahead of where the rest of the industry stood when he started.

Alaska and the End

In August 1935, Post was in Alaska ferrying Will Rogers - the radio personality and humorist who was among the most beloved public figures in America at the time - on a trip north to Point Barrow. The aircraft Post was flying was a hybrid floatplane he had assembled himself, partly improvised and not well balanced for the configuration he had built.

They took off from a lagoon near Point Barrow in low visibility. The aircraft stalled at low altitude.

Both men were killed. Wiley Post was 36 years old.

The pressure suit research he had begun, the jet stream observations he was systematizing, the practical knowledge of high-altitude flight operations he was accumulating - all of it was left for engineers, test pilots, and researchers to carry forward without him.

Where the Winnie Mae Is Today

The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in the Milestones of Flight gallery. She is smaller than most visitors expect. The cockpit is tight. The instrument panel is sparse by any modern standard. It is the aircraft that flew 15,500 miles alone, navigated by dead reckoning and an early autopilot, by a man with one eye - who then spent the rest of his brief career trying to solve problems the rest of aviation wouldn’t formally address for another generation.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, departing Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 15, 1933 in the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae.
Post and navigator Harold Gatty had previously set the around-the-world record in 1931 at 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes - cutting the prior Graf Zeppelin record of 21 days by more than half.
Post’s use of the Sperry Gyropilot during the solo circumnavigation was a pioneering application of human-automation pairing in long-distance flight, anticipating how crew-automation workload sharing would be formalized decades later.
The B.F. Goodrich pressure suit Post developed in 1934 - functional on the third attempt - is the direct ancestor of pressurized cabin technology in every commercial and military aircraft flying today.
Post made the first systematic airborne observations of the jet stream during 1935 high-altitude research flights, producing data that informed generations of route planning and meteorology.