Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oilfield Roughneck Who Flew Around the World Twice and Found the Jet Stream Before Anyone Knew It Was There

Wiley Post was a one-eyed Oklahoma oilfield worker who became one of aviation’s greatest pioneers. Between 1931 and 1935, he flew around the world twice - first with a navigator, then completely alone - and later discovered the jet stream while developing the world’s first practical pressure suit. He bought his first airplane with the workman’s compensation money he received for the eye he lost on a drilling rig.

Who Was Wiley Post?

In 1926, Wiley Post was a roughneck working the oil rigs of West Texas - hard, dirty, dangerous work in an era when the country ran on crude and muscle. One day a chip of steel flew off a drilling bit and struck him in the left eye. Infection set in, and doctors removed the eye entirely to save his life.

For a man who dreamed of flying, this was devastating. He had just lost half his depth perception in an era when depth perception was everything for landing an airplane. There was no radar altimeter, no glass panel - just a pilot’s eyes, the ground rushing up, and his hands.

Most men would have abandoned the dream. Post did the opposite.

He received $1,898 in workman’s compensation for the lost eye. Instead of banking it or paying down debt, he used the money to buy a small open-cockpit biplane. Then he taught himself to judge distance all over again with a single eye - staring at fence posts, telephone poles, and the corners of barns until his brain relearned how to read depth. He rebuilt the sense from scratch through sheer determination.

The Winnie Mae and the First Trip Around the World

By the late 1920s, Post was flying for a wealthy Oklahoma oilman named F.C. Hall, who purchased a brand-new Lockheed Vega - a sleek, all-wood monoplane with a single high wing and a big radial engine, remarkably clean and fast for its day. Hall named the white-and-blue airplane after his daughter: the Winnie Mae.

In 1931, long-distance record flying was the biggest show on Earth. Post decided to fly the Winnie Mae around the world. He brought along an Australian navigator named Harold Gatty, a master of finding tiny islands in vast oceans with a sextant and a wristwatch.

They took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same grass strip Charles Lindbergh had departed from four years earlier - and headed east.

Their route crossed Newfoundland, the North Atlantic to England, then Germany, across the enormous expanse of the Soviet Union, and through the empty reaches of Siberia. In Alaska, Post bent a propeller in the mud at Flat; he and Gatty straightened it by hand and flew on. From there it was back across Canada and down onto the grass at Roosevelt Field, where a crowd nearly broke through the ropes to reach them.

The total time: 8 days, 15 hours, and some odd minutes. They had circled the planet in the span of a two-week vacation. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, and the President welcomed them at the White House. The one-eyed roughneck was suddenly the most famous aviator alive, second only to Lindbergh.

The First Solo Flight Around the World

Post wasn’t satisfied. He had circled the globe with a navigator, and a question nagged at him: could a single pilot fly and navigate and stay awake across half the world alone?

To attempt it, he turned to technology. The Winnie Mae was fitted with one of the very first autopilots - a Sperry gyroscopic unit that could hold a heading and keep the wings level while the pilot rested his eyes or ate. He also added a radio direction finder to steer toward navigation beacons.

That Sperry autopilot was, in effect, the ancestor of every autopilot flying today - from the wing-leveler in a small Cessna to the flight director in an airliner crossing the ocean tonight. It traces directly back to a one-eyed pilot who knew he couldn’t stay awake forever and was humble enough to let a gyroscope help.

In 1933, Post did it alone. Flying roughly the same route, he landed back at Floyd Bennett Field in New York after 7 days, 18 hours - beating his own two-man record by himself. He slept only in snatches, famously tying a wrench to his finger with string so that when he dozed off, the falling wrench would jerk him awake.

Wiley Post became the first person to fly solo around the world.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

Post’s most lasting contribution came next. He grew curious about flying very high - far above the weather. He suspected that in the thin, cold air up there flowed rivers of fast-moving wind that a pilot could ride from west to east, gaining a hundred or two hundred miles per hour of free groundspeed.

Today we call it the jet stream. Any pilot who has flown east across the country and arrived early on a screaming tailwind - or slogged west into a fuel-eating headwind - knows that river well. Post went looking for it before anyone had a name for it.

There was one enormous problem: the Winnie Mae was built of wood and glue, and you cannot pressurize a wooden airplane. Taking an unpressurized cabin to 40,000 or 50,000 feet is fatal - no oxygen, killing cold, and blood that tries to boil in thin air.

So if Post couldn’t pressurize the airplane, he decided to pressurize the man.

The First Practical Pressure Suit

Post partnered with the B.F. Goodrich company - the tire manufacturer - to build the first practical pressure suit in the world. It featured a rubber inner bladder, an outer shell of rubberized cloth, and a hard metal-and-glass helmet riveted on top, round as a diving bell with a single small porthole. Pumped full of oxygen, it held pressure around him like a cocoon.

Climbing into his wooden airplane in that getup, Post looked like a man headed to the bottom of the sea - or to the moon. In a sense, he was headed somewhere just as unexplored.

He took the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet, higher than airliners cruise today. Up there in the screaming cold, one eye pressed to the porthole, he found his rivers of wind. On one flight his groundspeed indicated a tailwind of well over 100 miles per hour that simply should not have been possible.

He had found the jet stream - and figured out how to keep a human alive to fly in it. Every pressurized airliner cabin, every fighter pilot’s full-pressure suit, and every astronaut’s spacesuit descends from the rubber suit Post dreamed up to chase a wind nobody believed existed.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

By 1935, Post had assembled a hybrid floatplane from spare parts and wanted to scout a mail and passenger route through Alaska and on to Russia. He invited a friend along: the beloved cowboy humorist Will Rogers, perhaps the most famous man in America, remembered for saying he never met a man he didn’t like.

On August 15, 1935, near a lonely lagoon not far from Point Barrow at the very top of Alaska, the two men landed to ask Native hunters for directions, then took off again into fog. The engine quit low over the water. The nose-heavy floatplane stalled and dropped into the shallow lagoon, killing both men instantly.

The nation stopped cold. Two heroes lost in a single crash at the edge of the world. Flags dropped to half-staff and newspapers ran black borders. Wiley Post was 36 years old.

Where Is the Winnie Mae Today?

The Winnie Mae outlived her pilot. Post’s widow sold the airplane to the Smithsonian, and it remains on display today at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. - still wearing its blue trim and the name painted on the nose. Standing before the small wooden aircraft, it is hard to believe one man circled the entire Earth in it alone. It looks too small, too fragile, too plain.

But that was always the point. It was never the airplane. It was the man who refused to quit - the one who lost an eye and taught himself to see distance again with fence posts, who tied a wrench to his finger to stay awake, and who put on a rubber suit to go hunting for a wind that appeared on no chart.

The next time you’re eastbound at altitude and notice your groundspeed running well above your true airspeed, remember that the free ride you’re enjoying - that river in the sky - was found first by a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck in a wooden airplane, wearing a diving helmet.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post bought his first airplane with the $1,898 he received as compensation for the left eye he lost in a 1926 oilfield accident, then retrained his depth perception with one eye.
In 1931, Post and navigator Harold Gatty flew the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days, 15 hours.
In 1933, Post became the first person to fly solo around the world, finishing in 7 days, 18 hours with the help of an early Sperry autopilot and radio direction finder.
Post discovered the jet stream above 40,000 feet and developed the world’s first practical pressure suit with B.F. Goodrich, the ancestor of modern pressurization and spacesuits.
Post died on August 15, 1935 near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside humorist Will Rogers, at age 36; the Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.