Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oilfield Worker Who Flew Solo Around the World and Found the Jet Stream

In 1933, a one-eyed former oilfield worker named Wiley Post flew alone around the planet in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - breaking his own world record and placing himself among the most consequential figures in aviation history. He did it with an experimental autopilot, fractured sleep over Siberia, no formal education, and one functioning eye. But the circumnavigation wasn’t even his most important contribution to aviation.

From an Oklahoma Oil Field to the Cockpit

Wiley Post was born in 1898 in Grand Plain, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma after his family relocated when he was young. His formal education ended around the sixth grade - not unusual for rural families in that era when the farm or the oil field made more immediate demands than the schoolhouse.

By his mid-twenties he was working drilling rigs in Oklahoma. In 1926, a flying piece of drilling equipment cost him his left eye. The company settled with him for $1,800.

Post used that money to buy an airplane.

He took some instruction and largely taught himself the rest, developing alternative visual references to compensate for the loss of binocular depth perception. He read runway edge angles and the rate of change in apparent size rather than the stereo cues a two-eyed pilot uses automatically. He crashed a few times early on. He kept flying. By the late 1920s he was precise enough to earn a living at air shows and passenger hops - and crowds forgot they were watching something the medical establishment had called impossible.

The Winnie Mae and the Lockheed Vega

In 1928, Post went to work as personal pilot for F.C. Hall, an Oklahoma City oil man who owned a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae after his daughter.

The Vega was exceptional for its era. Lockheed designed it as a fast mail and passenger aircraft - a high-wing monoplane with wooden monocoque construction, meaning the fuselage was built as a structural shell rather than a fabric-covered frame. The result was a clean, drag-reducing shape that outpaced most of its contemporaries. Power came from a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine, reliable and well-suited to the routes and altitudes that mattered.

The cockpit was cramped, the instrumentation sparse by any modern standard. No weather radar. No moving map. Gauges, a compass, and whatever the pilot carried in his head.

Post flew the Winnie Mae for Hall and began thinking about what the airplane could do over a very long runway.

Around the World with Harold Gatty, 1931

In 1931, Post proposed a record circumnavigation to Hall, bringing in Harold Gatty - a Tasmanian-born celestial navigation expert - as his navigator.

They left Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931, flying east: England, Berlin, Moscow, then across the Soviet Union. The Soviet legs required diplomatic coordination arranged months in advance, fuel drums pre-positioned at remote Siberian airstrips, and a good deal of improvisation when planning and reality diverged. Gatty navigated. Post flew. They pushed east across the taiga - an indifferent, enormous landscape that doesn’t know you’re there and doesn’t care - crossed into Alaska, refueled through Canada, and returned to Roosevelt Field.

Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. A new world record. Broadway gave them a parade. President Hoover sent congratulations. Will Rogers - writer, humorist, and one of the most beloved public figures in America - wrote about the flight with genuine awe.

Post, almost immediately, started thinking about what needed to improve.

Flying Solo Around the World, 1933

The chief problem with a solo circumnavigation wasn’t the flying. It was the sleeping.

A human being cannot maintain useful alertness for eight days. Sleep deprivation degrades judgment and reaction time well before the person experiencing it feels significantly impaired. In a single-engine aircraft over Siberia, the margin for that kind of mistake is very small.

Post worked with engineers at Sperry Gyroscope to adapt an autopilot capable of holding course for extended periods over water and wilderness. The engineering focus was on gyroscope precession - the tendency of gyroscopes to drift from their reference heading over time. What they arrived at wasn’t perfect, but it was reliable enough: Post could set the heading, close his eye, sleep for twenty minutes, and wake up roughly on course.

He also installed a radio direction finder under the nose - a loop antenna that could home in on commercial radio broadcasts for positional data when atmospheric conditions cooperated. He added fuel tanks and trimmed weight wherever possible.

On the night of July 15, 1933, Post lifted off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, pointed northeast over the Atlantic. He put down in England, refueled, and pressed on to Berlin, then east.

The Soviet legs he flew on compass heading and dead reckoning. Near a place called Rukhlovo in Siberia, he landed on a soft field and the main gear sank into the ground. Local Soviet workers came out, curious about the blue-and-white airplane that had appeared in their territory. They brought boards. They pushed and pulled. Eventually the aircraft came free. Post checked the engine and airframe, found nothing critical, and got airborne again.

He crossed into Alaska, stopped at Nome and Fairbanks, then drove south through Canada.

July 22, 1933. Seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. Approximately 25,000 miles. Alone.

Post was 34 years old. He had just become the first human being to fly solo around the entire planet, breaking his own 1931 record by nearly a full day.

The Theory That Wouldn’t Leave Him Alone: Discovering the Jet Stream

Most accounts of Wiley Post end with the solo record. That’s a mistake.

After the circumnavigation, Post became focused on altitude - not for a trophy or a headline, but because he had a theory. At altitudes around 35,000 to 40,000 feet, he believed there existed extremely powerful winds: consistent, fast, and predictable enough to push an aircraft across continents at ground speeds no engine could produce on its own.

What Post was describing, in 1934, was the jet stream. No one had proved it existed. These are the same high-altitude winds that modern airliners exploit on eastbound routes today, trimming flight times and fuel burn on every transatlantic crossing.

Reaching those altitudes and gathering useful data required solving two problems. The first was the engine: the Winnie Mae would need a supercharged powerplant to operate efficiently above 30,000 feet, where the air is too thin for a normally aspirated engine to function.

The second problem was the pilot.

At 40,000 feet, ambient pressure is approximately one-fifth of sea level pressure. Without protection, a human being loses consciousness in seconds and is dead within minutes. Pressurizing the Vega’s cockpit to the required degree wasn’t feasible. So Post approached B.F. Goodrich, and together they built the world’s first practical full-pressure flight suit.

The first suit leaked too badly to be useful at altitude. The second was better but still unreliable. The third worked.

Post flew the modified, supercharged Winnie Mae to altitudes where the sky darkens overhead and the horizon shows visible curvature. He logged ground speeds the Vega’s engine could not have produced on its own. The data he submitted to the Smithsonian and to meteorological authorities became foundational evidence for what would later be formally named, mapped, and exploited by every long-haul airline on the planet.

The jet stream was real. A one-eyed oilfield worker from Oklahoma had found it.

A Legacy That Reached Outer Space

The pressure suit Post developed across those three iterations with B.F. Goodrich was not a curiosity. It was a template.

The suits worn by U-2 reconnaissance pilots in the 1950s trace a direct design lineage to Post’s work. The engineering principles worked out in that collaboration - between an aviator with a theory and a rubber company willing to take it seriously - appeared in early spaceflight hardware. The suit Post pulled on in 1934 to go find out whether the jet stream existed was the conceptual ancestor of the equipment that kept human beings alive beyond the atmosphere.

A sixth-grade education and one good eye produced a contribution that the space program built on.

The Fatal Flight at Point Barrow, 1935

In the summer of 1935, Post and Will Rogers planned an exploratory flight through Alaska, scouting Arctic routes. Rogers was perhaps the most beloved public figure in America at the time - humorist, writer, radio broadcaster, with a warmth that seemed to reach through every medium.

Post was flying a hybrid aircraft, an Orion fuselage mated to a Sirius wing and fitted with floats for Alaskan waterways. It was an unusual configuration whose floats shifted the center of gravity in ways that affected low-speed handling.

On August 15, 1935, they stopped near Point Barrow - the northernmost point of Alaska, a flat spit of land jutting into the Arctic Ocean. They asked a local Inuit man for directions to the village of Barrow, climbed back into the aircraft, and took off.

Fifty feet in the air, the engine quit. The aircraft went straight down into the shallow river delta below.

Wiley Post and Will Rogers were killed instantly. Post was 36 years old.

The grief was enormous and real. Rogers had been beloved in a way few public figures are before or since, and his loss hit millions of Americans like a death in the family. Post was mourned deeply by an aviation community that had watched him accomplish things the conventional wisdom had declared impossible.

Where to Find the Winnie Mae Today

Post had donated the Winnie Mae to the Smithsonian the year before his death, already recognized as a historic artifact while her pilot was still flying other airplanes toward other theories.

She hangs today in the main National Air and Space Museum building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. - not at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, but in the original building. Blue fuselage, white trim, the rounded Vega nose, the Pratt & Whitney Wasp under the cowling.

She hangs not far from Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Two aircraft, two pilots, two flights that said something permanent about what human beings can do when they decide they are going to do it. The Winnie Mae doesn’t get photographed as often as Lindbergh’s airplane, but she carried a man around the world alone, helped prove the jet stream was real, and came home from every flight her pilot ever asked her to make.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post (1898–1935) lost his left eye in a 1926 oil field accident and used the $1,800 settlement to buy his first airplane, teaching himself to fly using alternative depth cues after losing binocular vision.
He set the first around-the-world record with navigator Harold Gatty in 1931 (8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes), then broke it flying solo in 1933 (7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes - approximately 25,000 miles).
Post’s high-altitude research in 1934 produced foundational evidence for the jet stream - the same high-altitude winds that modern airlines rely on for eastbound fuel savings every day.
The full-pressure flight suit he developed with B.F. Goodrich across three iterations became a direct ancestor of U-2 pilot equipment and early spaceflight pressure suits.
The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., hanging near Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.