Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oilfield Hand Who Flew Solo Around the World

Wiley Post flew around the world twice, once with a navigator and once alone, using aircraft and equipment that most modern pilots would decline for a routine cross-country. Along the way, he discovered the jet stream, pioneered high-altitude pressure suits, and reshaped how we understand the atmosphere above 40,000 feet.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born in 1898 in a farmhouse in Texas and grew up in rural Oklahoma. His family farmed. He worked. Nothing in his early life pointed toward greatness in the air - only a hunger for machinery and speed, and a willingness to attempt things most people would walk away from.

He saw his first airplane at a county fair around age fifteen and never recovered from it. But flying was not immediately within reach. He spent his young adult years in the Oklahoma oilfields - roughnecking, drilling, doing the hard and genuinely dangerous work that defined that industry in the 1910s and ’20s.

How Losing an Eye Led Wiley Post to Aviation

In 1926, while working a drilling rig, a piece of metal from a chisel struck Post in the left eye. The eye had to be removed. The insurance settlement was $1,800.

Post used that money to buy flying lessons.

Most people would have adjusted their ambitions after losing an eye. Depth perception matters in the air. Peripheral vision matters in the pattern and on approach. Post flew until his brain adapted, developing spatial judgment that compensated for what two-eyed pilots take for granted. Those who watched him fly described him as smooth, precise, and decisive, with a touch on the controls that came from something deeper than technique.

He found work as a personal pilot for Oklahoma oil man F.C. Hall, who had purchased a Lockheed Vega and named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter.

The Lockheed Vega: The Airplane Behind the Records

John Northrop designed the Vega in the late 1920s, built by Lockheed in Burbank, California. It was genuinely different from nearly everything else flying at the time.

The fuselage was a wooden monocoque shell - the skin itself carried the structural load rather than an internal framework of ribs and spars. High wing, clean bracing, no external wire bracing to clutter the airflow. The Winnie Mae carried a Pratt & Whitney Wasp producing around 450 horsepower and cruised at roughly 150 mph. In the early 1930s, that was real speed.

Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic alone in a Vega. Post used one to circle the globe. Twice.

The First Round-the-World Flight: Post and Gatty, 1931

Post’s first circumnavigation was not a solo effort. Harold Gatty, an Australian-born navigator, handled the charts. Gatty understood celestial navigation at something close to the level of instinct - integrating sextant readings, dead reckoning, and aircraft motion into a precise position fix with a speed that seemed almost unfair.

They departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931, and flew east: Germany, Moscow, across the Soviet Union, through Siberia, over Alaska, through Canada, back to New York.

The Soviets had pre-positioned fuel caches along the Siberian route. Without that cooperation, the route simply didn’t work. But logistics on paper bore little resemblance to flying it. Siberia was desolate permafrost tundra, hour after hour, with limited radio navigation and weather that could close in without any forecast worth trusting.

At one stop, the Winnie Mae rolled into soft mud while taxiing. Local villagers - many of whom had never seen an airplane - came out and pushed her free without being asked. At another, Post made a rough beach landing because the designated field was waterlogged. They assessed, repaired, and kept going.

They landed back at Roosevelt Field on July 1, 1931: 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes. A world record. A ticker-tape parade in New York followed.

Post was already thinking about doing it without Gatty.

Going It Alone: The 1933 Solo World Flight

Two years of planning preceded the solo attempt. The core problem was not navigation or fuel - it was human endurance. Flying solo around the world meant managing everything yourself, around the clock, while your brain slowly degraded from sleep deprivation.

Post worked with engineers at the Sperry Gyroscope Company to modify a gyroscopic autopilot for the Winnie Mae. He was not a customer picking from a catalog; he was a co-designer. The resulting system could hold a heading and keep the wings level well enough that Post could close his eyes for 20 minutes without the airplane entering a spiral. Without it, a solo around-the-world attempt in that era was not a plan - it was a death sentence dressed as one.

He also installed a radio direction finder with a loop antenna to pick up ground-based beacons and confirm position when visual references were gone.

Post departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn at 5:00 a.m. on July 15, 1933. The first leg to Berlin took 25 hours and 45 minutes. He was already deep in his sleep deficit when he refueled and pushed east toward Moscow.

The Siberian legs were brutal. Post later described the bone-deep fatigue of a long overnight solo - the mind drifting, snapping back, drifting again, the discipline required to keep eyes on the instruments when every part of you is negotiating for a few minutes of rest.

At a Siberian field called Flat, Post crashed on landing when the nose came down too hard on soft ground and the propeller took the impact. Soviet ground workers came out, examined it, retrieved tools, and hammered the propeller back to something close enough to balance for flight. That was the repair. Post climbed back in.

He crossed Alaska through weather and fatigue, turned south toward Edmonton, and continued east.

Post landed at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933: 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes. Solo. Around the world.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

On the long Siberian legs, Post had noticed something. At moderate altitudes, winds were unpredictable and variable - the same as everywhere else. But when weather had pushed him higher, above roughly 35,000 to 40,000 feet, the behavior changed. The winds up there were stronger, more consistent, and blew steadily from west to east.

His conclusion was direct: if you could reach those winds reliably, you could cross continents faster than anyone had calculated. The obstacle was physiological. Above 40,000 feet, an unpressurized human being dies within minutes. The atmosphere is too thin and the oxygen too sparse for the body to function.

Post decided to build a pressure suit. He went to the B.F. Goodrich Company and explained what he needed. The first suit failed - seams split under pressure. The second had problems with the helmet seal. The third suit worked.

The Pressure Suit and High-Altitude Research

The finished suit was rubberized canvas with a round helmet, a small viewing port, oxygen fed from a supply bottle, and hoses and fittings at the joints. It was stiff, uncomfortable, and made flying significantly harder because the material deadened feel on the controls. But it kept a pilot alive at extreme altitude.

The Winnie Mae was modified for this phase: a more powerful supercharged engine, liquid oxygen systems, and cockpit fittings for the pressure suit connections.

Post flew above 40,000 feet. Then above 50,000 feet. He recorded sustained winds of over 175 mph at extreme altitude, blowing consistently from west to east.

The meteorological community was slow to accept his findings. The atmospheric models of the time didn’t account for what he was describing. His reports didn’t fit the prevailing picture of how the upper atmosphere worked.

He was right. They were wrong.

What Post documented from the cockpit of a modified wooden Vega, wearing a homemade rubber suit, is what we now call the jet stream. The term came later - Post never used it. But those powerful high-altitude westerly winds above the tropopause that he was measuring are exactly what underpins modern aviation routing.

When a New York-to-London flight runs nearly an hour shorter than the return leg, that’s the jet stream. When a westbound Pacific crossing costs an extra hour over the eastbound, same reason. Every airline dispatcher in the world plans routes around it. Every long-haul pilot monitors it.

The Death of Wiley Post

Post died on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska.

He and Will Rogers - the humorist and radio personality who was arguably the most famous American of his era - had planned a flight to the Soviet Union. Post was flying a Vega he’d modified with floats for water operations and a heavier, more powerful engine. Those modifications had shifted the center of gravity forward, making the aircraft nose-heavy on takeoff.

They landed on a river near Point Barrow to ask an Inuit fisherman for directions to the next settlement. On the takeoff roll, the engine quit. At low altitude, with no room to recover, both men were killed.

The country mourned Will Rogers deeply. Post’s death received smaller headlines. That is often how it goes when a great man dies alongside a famous one.

Why Wiley Post Still Matters

Post was an oilfield worker from Oklahoma with no aviation pedigree, one eye, and no wealthy patron beyond a single oil man who lent him an airplane. He went around the world twice. He built a pressure suit from scratch because he needed one and nobody had made one. He found the jet stream because he flew high enough to notice it and was curious enough to investigate.

His pressure suit work directly influenced the development of military high-altitude flight suits and, eventually, the suits worn by astronauts. His high-altitude flight data shaped aircraft and engine design for the decades that followed.

The Winnie Mae and Post’s pressure suit are both on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The fuselage is roughly the diameter of a compact car. Standing next to it while holding all of that history in mind tends to land differently than reading about it.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post, born 1898 in Texas, used an $1,800 insurance settlement after losing his left eye in 1926 to fund his first flying lessons.
Post and navigator Harold Gatty completed a round-the-world flight in 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes in 1931, departing Roosevelt Field on Long Island.
Post flew the same route solo in 1933, completing the circumnavigation in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes - a record that stood for years.
Working with B.F. Goodrich, Post built three successive pressure suits; the third allowed him to fly above 50,000 feet and survive.
The sustained high-altitude westerly winds Post documented above 35,000 to 40,000 feet are now known as the jet stream, and they underpin every long-haul routing decision in commercial aviation today.