Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Nineteen Thirty-Three Solo Flight Around the World

Wiley Post flew solo around the world in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes in the summer of 1933 - a feat that still defines what one determined pilot and one reliable engine can accomplish. Along the way, he documented the jet stream before anyone had named it, pioneered the high-altitude pressure suit that would eventually evolve into astronaut gear, and did all of it with a prosthetic left eye. His airplane, the Winnie Mae, is at the Smithsonian today. His story is not nearly as well-known as it should be.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born in November 1898 on a farm in Grand Plain, Texas. His family relocated to Oklahoma when he was young, and he grew up doing hard labor - oil fields, cotton work, whatever paid. He saw his first airplane at a county fair around 1913, at age fourteen, and later said he knew at that moment that flying was his future.

He barnstormed in the early 1920s, scraping together flight time wherever he could. Pilots who flew with him described him as gifted - someone who held an airplane the way a craftsman holds a familiar tool.

How Did Post Lose His Eye - and Still Become a Record-Setting Pilot?

In 1926, a metal chip from a chisel struck Post while he was working an oil drilling crew near Seminole, Oklahoma. He lost his left eye. When his workmen’s compensation settlement of $1,800 arrived, he used it to buy an airplane.

He applied for a pilot’s certificate with one eye and received it. He flew with a glass prosthetic. His depth perception adapted, his spatial awareness proved exceptional, and pilots who flew alongside him said they genuinely could not tell the difference in the cockpit.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

By the late 1920s, Post was flying professionally for F.C. Hall, an Oklahoma oil man who owned a Lockheed Vega - one of the most technically advanced aircraft of its time. The Vega featured a wooden monocoque fuselage, a high wing, a fully enclosed cockpit, and a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine producing close to 450 horsepower. Against the open-cockpit biplanes most pilots were still flying, it looked like the future.

Hall named the airplane after his daughter: the Winnie Mae.

In 1930, Post flew the Winnie Mae in the National Air Race Derby from Los Angeles to Chicago and won decisively - finishing so far ahead of the field that people who had never heard of him were suddenly asking where he had come from. Shortly after the race, Hall transferred ownership to Post. The official price was one dollar.

How Did Post and Harold Gatty Circle the Globe in 1931?

In 1931, Post partnered with Harold Gatty - an Australian navigator born in Tasmania and one of the sharpest aerial navigators alive. Post would fly; Gatty would handle the charts, radio direction finder, and drift meter.

On June 23, 1931, they took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same grass strip Charles Lindbergh had used four years earlier for his Atlantic crossing. The route crossed England, Germany, Soviet Russia, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, hopping improvised airstrips and refueling depots across the top of the Northern Hemisphere.

They landed back at Roosevelt Field on July 1, 1931, in a time of 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. Ten thousand people were waiting. A ticker-tape parade followed in New York City.

Why Did Post Attempt a Solo Circumnavigation?

Post believed one man could do what two had done - and do it faster. To make that work without a navigator, he needed tools that did not yet exist. So he had them built.

He worked with the Sperry Corporation to develop an early autopilot system. It used gyroscopes and pneumatic actuators - not the digital systems modern pilots fly behind, but a mechanical device capable of holding the Winnie Mae on heading and altitude while Post slept in short intervals during the long legs. He called it Iron Mike.

He also added fuel capacity, worked on radio navigation, and spent months memorizing the route: airfield locations, landmarks, alternate divert points, and weather patterns over Siberia and Alaska.

How Did Wiley Post Fly Around the World Alone in 1933?

On July 15, 1933, Post taxied the Winnie Mae to the runway at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and lifted off into a gray overcast. Alone.

The route took him to Berlin, then east to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), then to Moscow, then to Novosibirsk in western Siberia. He navigated by compass, drift estimation, and the rivers, rail lines, and settlements he had memorized from his charts. Radio contact was sparse. Weather services were primitive by any modern standard.

From Novosibirsk he pressed on to Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East, then crossed the Bering Sea - a stretch of cold water with fast-changing weather that has ended careers and lives. He made Fairbanks, Alaska, flew southeast to Edmonton, Alberta, and turned east for the final leg home.

On July 22, 1933, the Winnie Mae touched down at Floyd Bennett Field. Seven days. Eighteen hours. Forty-nine minutes. Post had beaten his own 1931 record by nearly 21 hours, covering more than 15,000 miles alone. He stepped out of the cockpit unshaven and red-eyed, made a brief statement to the press, and asked if there was food. When a reporter pressed him to describe his most dramatic moment, he said every moment was just its job.

Did Wiley Post Discover the Jet Stream?

Flying over Siberia at altitude, Post encountered winds that made no sense on paper - tailwinds so powerful that his groundspeed jumped dramatically beyond anything the era’s weather forecasts predicted. He had no name for the phenomenon. But he wrote about it and reported his observations to scientists and meteorologists in detail.

Those firsthand accounts were among the first systematic documentation of high-altitude wind corridors from an aircraft - what we now call the jet stream. Every time a pilot pulls up a winds aloft forecast before a cross-country, that forecasting system carries a line of credit back to those Wiley Post flight reports.

What Was Wiley Post’s Pressure Suit - and Why Does It Matter?

After the 1933 record, Post turned his attention to high-altitude flight. He understood that if jet stream winds were real and consistent, a pilot who could operate above 40,000 feet - inside those fast-moving rivers of air, above the weather - could cross the earth faster than anyone had conceived. The obstacle was physiology: above that altitude, without pressurization, the human body loses consciousness.

Post approached B.F. Goodrich with the requirement. They built three prototypes.

The first was so rigid Post could not bend his knees to enter the cockpit.
The second failed during inflation testing, collapsing inward on itself.
The third worked.

Post wore the third suit and flew the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet in a series of test flights, recording groundspeeds that demonstrated high-altitude pressurized flight was not theoretical - it was the future.

That third prototype pressure suit sits at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum today, alongside the Winnie Mae. It is the direct ancestor of the suits worn by U-2 reconnaissance pilots in the 1950s, X-15 pilots in the 1960s, and the early Mercury astronauts. Every high-altitude pressure garment that followed traces a line back to a rubber-and-canvas suit built for a one-eyed Oklahoma pilot who refused to accept that any altitude was out of reach.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

On August 15, 1935, Post and American humorist Will Rogers were flying together in Alaska, exploring a potential route for a trans-Pacific airmail service Post hoped to establish. They were flying a hybrid floatplane - a Lockheed Orion fuselage married to Sirius wings, not an ideal combination.

They stopped at a lagoon near Point Barrow to ask directions from Inuit residents. Post taxied to shore, got the information, and took off. The engine failed shortly after liftoff. The airplane went into the water nose-first. Both men died instantly. Wiley Post was 36 years old.

The death of Will Rogers drew enormous national grief, and the coverage went on for weeks. In the middle of it, the country did not fully stop to account for what else had just been lost: two solo circumnavigations, the first firsthand documentation of the jet stream, the first practical high-altitude pressure suit, and a life spent demonstrating that no condition - not a missing eye, not an uncharted sky, not an altitude no human had yet survived - was a disqualifying limitation.

The Winnie Mae is smaller than most people expect when they see her in person. That polished wooden fuselage. The Pratt & Whitney Wasp up front. The same airplane Post flew around the world twice and used to document phenomena that pilots rely on every single time they file a flight plan.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe on July 22, 1933, in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, flying the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and back.
Post flew with a prosthetic left eye after losing his eye in a 1926 oil field accident, using a $1,800 workers’ compensation settlement to purchase his first airplane.
His 1931 round-the-world flight with navigator Harold Gatty covered the distance in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes; his solo 1933 flight beat that mark by nearly 21 hours.
Observations Post recorded flying over Siberia represent some of the first firsthand documentation of the jet stream from a piloted aircraft.
The B.F. Goodrich pressure suit Post tested above 40,000 feet is a direct predecessor of the suits worn by U-2 pilots, X-15 pilots, and Mercury astronauts - and is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum alongside the Winnie Mae.