Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oklahoma Boy Who Flew Solo Around the World

Wiley Post was the first person to fly solo around the world, completing the journey in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes in July 1933 aboard his Lockheed Vega, the Winnie Mae. A one-eyed farm kid from Oklahoma, Post relied on two then-experimental technologies to survive the flight alone: an early Sperry gyroscopic autopilot he nicknamed “Mechanical Mike” and a radio direction finder. He later helped invent the world’s first practical pressure suit, drawing a straight line from a plywood airplane of the 1930s to the space suits that walked on the moon.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was an Oklahoma oilfield worker with little formal schooling who became one of the most famous aviators of the golden age. He grew up in oil country and did hard, dangerous work on the rigs.

In 1926, a chip of metal struck him in the left eye during an oilfield accident, and he lost the eye. For most men, that injury would have ended any dream of flying before it began.

Instead, Post took his workman’s compensation settlement of roughly $1,800 and bought an airplane - an old barnstorming aircraft. He had already caught the flying bug years earlier, wing walking and parachute jumping with a flying circus, and now he taught himself to fly for real with a single eye.

Flying with monocular vision meant Post had to relearn how to judge a landing flare and read the picture out the windscreen. He held his head at an angle to compensate for the lost depth perception, and he became genuinely skilled at it.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

The Winnie Mae was a Lockheed Vega, a high-wing single-engine monoplane that was remarkably fast and clean for its era. Post flew it as the personal pilot for Oklahoma oilman F.C. Hall, who named the airplane after his daughter.

What set the Vega apart was its construction. Rather than the welded steel tube and fabric common at the time, Lockheed molded the fuselage from plywood, laid up in a concrete mold like two halves of an eggshell and glued together. The result was a smooth, aerodynamically slippery airframe.

Power came from a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine producing more than 400 horsepower, giving the Vega a true airspeed of over 150 miles per hour - blistering performance for the 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1930, Post flew the Winnie Mae to victory in the National Air Race Derby from Los Angeles to Chicago, beating the field and proving just how fast the airplane was.

The First Around-the-World Flight With Harold Gatty (1931)

Flying around the world had been done before, but only slowly - with teams of men, many stops, and weeks of calendar time. Post wanted to do it fast.

In 1931, he teamed up with a brilliant Australian navigator named Harold Gatty, who could fix a position anywhere on earth with a sextant, a watch, and a slide rule. Post would fly; Gatty would navigate.

They departed Roosevelt Field, New York, in June 1931, chasing the top of the globe through Newfoundland, England, Germany, across the Soviet Union on rough dirt strips, up through Alaska, and home.

They completed the circuit in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. The world celebrated with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, a book, and a White House handshake.

How Did Wiley Post Fly Solo Around the World?

Post flew solo around the world in July 1933 by relying on two pieces of new technology to do the work a navigator and a second pilot normally would: a gyroscopic autopilot and a radio direction finder.

The real enemy of a solo circumnavigation isn’t distance - it’s fatigue. Flying 18 to 20 hours, then wrestling the airplane onto a frozen strip, refueling by hand, and grabbing a couple hours of sleep before doing it again wears a single pilot down fast. The most exhausting task of all is holding heading and altitude for hour after hour with no relief.

The first tool was an early Sperry gyroscopic autopilot - a box of gyros and air valves that could hold the wings level and the nose on heading while the pilot rested. Post nicknamed it “Mechanical Mike” and treated it like a copilot over the North Atlantic. Every modern autopilot, from a full glass panel to a simple wing-leveler, traces back to this bet.

The second tool was a radio direction finder, which let Post home in on signals from ground stations and navigate without celestial work in the back seat. Autopilot and radio navigation together were the modern cockpit in embryo, strapped into a plywood airplane more than 90 years ago.

Life Inside the Cockpit

Post lifted the Winnie Mae off Floyd Bennett Field in New York in July 1933 and pointed her northeast into the dark, alone.

The cockpit was loud, with the Wasp radial roaring and almost no soundproofing. It was bitterly cold at altitude, and it reeked of gasoline, hot oil, old leather, and sweat. Extra fuel tanks crowded the cabin so tightly that on some legs Post could barely see over them - and every gallon sat between him and disaster if he landed poorly.

To fight sleep, Post rigged a wrench tied to one finger with a string. If he nodded off, the wrench would drop, yank his hand, and jolt him awake. That was fatigue management in 1933.

The trip was brutal. He got stuck in the mud in Siberia and locals hauled him out. He damaged a propeller that was straightened by hand and by luck. In Alaska he clipped a strip and bent the airplane, and it was patched up. Still he flew on.

He landed back in New York having completed the solo circuit in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, covering more than 15,000 miles. He had beaten his own record - the one set with a full-time navigator - flying entirely alone, becoming the first human being ever to fly solo around the world. A crowd of 50,000 people mobbed Floyd Bennett Field when he returned.

Wiley Post, the Jet Stream, and the First Pressure Suit

On his long, high-altitude legs, Post had noticed something: up where the air is thin, the Winnie Mae seemed to get a push from a river of fast-moving air. Today we call it the jet stream, and every airline flight is planned around it. Post was one of the first people to go looking for it deliberately.

To fly that high, a pilot has to be protected - and the Winnie Mae’s wooden fuselage couldn’t be pressurized. So Post partnered with the B.F. Goodrich company to build something that had never existed: a pressure suit a man could wear like a diver, making his own body the sealed cockpit the airplane couldn’t provide.

The early attempts failed comically and dangerously. The first suits split at the seams. One seized up and swelled stiff, and Post had to be cut out of it. They kept refining until they had a working design - a rubber and canvas suit with a metal helmet like a deep-sea diver’s, complete with a small round porthole.

Wearing it, Post climbed the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet - some accounts say close to 50,000 - into air too thin for an unprotected human to survive. There he found his river of wind, recording ground speeds that made no sense for the airplane, because the sky itself was carrying him along.

That suit connects directly to the high-flying bombers of World War II, the pressure suits of the test pilots who broke the sound barrier, and the space suits that walked on the moon. It started with an oilfield kid and a tire company.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

In August 1935, Post died in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside his friend, the beloved humorist and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers.

Post was flying a hybrid Lockheed built up specially and fitted with floats. The two men had gone north to fly and explore. Shortly after takeoff, the engine quit. The float-equipped airplane was nose-heavy, and there wasn’t enough height or time to recover. It came down in a shallow lagoon, killing both men.

The nation stopped to mourn two American originals. Wiley Post was 36 years old.

Where Is the Winnie Mae Today?

The Winnie Mae survived Post and now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, suspended in the air with her name still painted on the nose. Visitors can stand beneath her wing and look up at the airplane that flew around the world alone.

Post sold the airplane to the nation, ensuring the aircraft that made history would be preserved for the public.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post was the first person to fly solo around the world, in July 1933, covering more than 15,000 miles in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes.
He flew with one eye, having lost the left one in a 1926 oilfield accident, and bought his first airplane with an $1,800 compensation settlement.
His aircraft, the Winnie Mae, was a plywood-fuselage Lockheed Vega powered by a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine.
Post succeeded by pioneering the Sperry autopilot (“Mechanical Mike”) and radio direction finding, and later co-developed the first practical pressure suit with B.F. Goodrich while exploring the jet stream.
Post died with Will Rogers in a 1935 crash near Point Barrow, Alaska; the Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.