Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oklahoma Roughneck Who Flew Around the World Alone

Wiley Post used an $1,800 workplace accident settlement to buy his first airplane, then went on to circumnavigate the globe twice, pioneer high-altitude stratospheric research, and lay the engineering groundwork for the pressure suits that would eventually carry astronauts into space. He did it all with one eye, flying an airplane built largely of wood.

From the Oil Fields to the Cockpit

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in East Texas on November 22, 1898. His family relocated to Oklahoma when he was young, and he spent his formative years farming and working the oil fields. He never finished the eighth grade.

His first encounter with an airplane came at a county fair around 1913, when he was fifteen. A barnstormer was flying lazy circles over the midway in a rattling biplane. Whatever took hold of Post in that moment never let go.

His path to aviation wasn’t direct. His late teens and early twenties included a stint at the Oklahoma State Reformatory for car theft and a return to the oil fields. Then, in 1926, a chain snapped on a drilling rig and took his left eye.

The company settled for $1,800. Post used it to pay for flight lessons.

A Natural Pilot Despite - or Because of - One Eye

Post trained with a barnstormer and flight instructor named Burrell Tibbs out of Wewoka, Oklahoma. He soloed quickly. His instructors said they had never seen anything quite like it - a natural precision that compensated for the loss of depth perception on his left side. He was barnstorming, parachute jumping, and racing within months.

He won his first air race in 1926, barely into his flying career. The aviation community was paying attention.

That attention brought him to a wealthy Oklahoma oil man named F.C. Hall, who wanted a private aircraft and a pilot to match. Hall purchased a Lockheed Vega, named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter, and hired Post to fly it.

The Lockheed Vega and What It Made Possible

The Vega was one of the fastest and most capable aircraft of the era - a high-wing monoplane with a wooden monocoque fuselage and a single Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine. Amelia Earhart flew one solo across the Atlantic. Hubert Wilkins flew one to the Arctic. For speed and range in the late 1920s, there was nothing better.

Flying the Winnie Mae for Hall, Post began thinking about what the aircraft - and he - were genuinely capable of.

Around the World, the First Time: 1931

By 1931, Post had a plan to fly around the world. He needed a navigator and found one in Harold Gatty, an Australian with an exceptional gift for celestial navigation and dead reckoning.

They mapped a route: England - Germany - Russia - Siberia - Alaska - Canada - New York.

Post and Gatty departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931, at 4:55 in the morning - the same field from which Charles Lindbergh had left for Paris four years earlier.

They returned 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes later, having covered 15,474 miles through fog over the North Atlantic, summer storms over the Russian taiga, mud runways, mechanical problems, and sustained fatigue. New York received them with a ticker-tape parade.

The Solo Record: 1933

Post was already planning the solo circumnavigation before the parade ended.

On July 15, 1933, he departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn alone. The Winnie Mae had been modified for the attempt. She carried a Sperry gyropilot - an early autopilot capable of holding a heading and keeping the wings level. Post also rigged a crude wrist alarm: if he fell asleep and his arm dropped, the alarm would fire.

He flew east across the Atlantic to Germany. Through Russia to Novosibirsk, then Irkutsk, then Khabarovsk. Up through Alaska. Across Canada. Back to New York.

He landed on July 22, 1933: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. Nearly eleven hours faster than he and Gatty had managed together. It was the first solo circumnavigation of the Earth by air.

The Jet Stream: An Unrecognized Discovery

During longer high-altitude flights, Post had been logging something he couldn’t explain - massive, consistent westerly winds at certain altitudes. The Winnie Mae was being pushed at groundspeeds that had no relationship to the air she was moving through.

No one had a name for it. The phenomenon we now call the jet stream wouldn’t be formally mapped until the 1940s, when B-29 Superfortress crews flying high above Japan during World War II encountered the same winds - shoved along at impossible groundspeeds westbound, fighting brutal headwinds eastbound.

Post was documenting this in the early 1930s. The scientific establishment was skeptical of reports from an Oklahoma roughneck about the upper atmosphere. He kept going anyway.

The Pressure Suit: Building Technology That Didn’t Exist

Post wanted to go higher and use those stratospheric winds as a highway above the weather. The problem was human physiology. Above roughly 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is too thin to breathe and the temperature is unsurvivable without a pressurized environment. The Winnie Mae had no pressurization. Nobody was flying pressurized aircraft in 1933.

Post approached the B.F. Goodrich Company and sat down with a rubber engineer named Russell Colley. He described what he needed: a full-body pressurized suit that would still allow him to work the controls of an aircraft.

Nothing like it existed. They built it from scratch.

The first version was too small - they got Post into it to the waist and had to cut him free.

The second version fit better, but the wrist seals leaked pressure.

The third version worked.

The finished suit was a rubberized fabric garment pressurized from an onboard oxygen system. The helmet was adapted from a real pigskin football helmet with a small rectangular viewport cut into the front. It looked like something from a science fiction magazine. It worked like nothing that had ever existed.

Post flew the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet. On later flights, he pushed past 50,000 feet - altitudes that would not be routine for any aircraft for another decade. He was alone, in a wooden airplane, at the edge of the stratosphere, taking notes.

The stratospheric winds were there every time.

Why This Legacy Matters More Than the Records

The around-the-world flights are the headline, and they deserve to be. But the stratospheric work is the legacy that changed aviation’s trajectory.

What Post and Colley built together in those years is the direct ancestor of every high-altitude pressure suit that followed - the suits worn by Air Force test pilots in the early jet age, and the suits that eventually carried human beings into orbit. There is a straight line from Post’s third pressure suit prototype to Alan Shepard suiting up for Freedom Seven in 1961.

The jet stream observations Post logged - largely dismissed at the time - contributed to a body of knowledge that fundamentally reshaped meteorology and aviation route planning. Every transoceanic flight that takes advantage of jet stream winds today is flying a path he helped trace.

The Death of Wiley Post

Wiley Post died on August 15, 1935. He was 36 years old.

He had been traveling around Alaska with Will Rogers, the humorist and one of the most beloved public figures in America. Post was flying a heavily modified floatplane - a hybrid of Lockheed Orion and Explorer components fitted with oversized floats that observers noted made the nose sit heavy.

They took off from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska. The engine quit. The aircraft went nose-down into the water. Rogers was killed immediately. Post died within minutes.

The country went quiet.

The Winnie Mae Today

The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. She is visible near the entrance - the actual aircraft, unchanged from her record flights, the one that circumnavigated the globe twice and flew into the stratosphere when most aircraft never climbed above ten thousand feet.

Post started with $1,800 from a workplace accident and no education past the eighth grade. He ended his career having laid the engineering foundation for human spaceflight and discovered a global atmospheric phenomenon. Aviation has always been indifferent to credentials. It has never been indifferent to precision, nerve, and the willingness to go somewhere no one has been before.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post lost his left eye in a 1926 oil field accident and used the $1,800 settlement to begin flying - he soloed rapidly and won his first air race within months.
The 1931 round-the-world flight with Harold Gatty covered 15,474 miles in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes; the 1933 solo flight bettered that time by nearly eleven hours.
Post’s high-altitude flights in the early 1930s produced the first documented observations of what we now call the jet stream, years before it was formally identified.
Working with B.F. Goodrich engineer Russell Colley, Post developed the first functional high-altitude pressure suit - a direct ancestor of the suits used by test pilots and astronauts.
Post died on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, in a floatplane crash that also killed Will Rogers; he was 36 years old.