Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oklahoma Roughneck Who Flew Solo Around the World in Seven Days

Wiley Post was a one-eyed, seventh-grade-educated former oilfield roughneck who became one of the greatest long-distance pilots in history. In July 1933, flying a white Lockheed Vega named the Winnie Mae, he became the first person to fly solo around the world, completing the journey in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. Along the way he helped pioneer the aircraft autopilot, invented the first practical pressure suit, and became one of the first aviators to discover the jet stream.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was not born into aviation. He grew up dirt poor on hardscrabble farms in Texas and then Oklahoma, one of many children in a family that had no money for flying lessons and no airplane to inherit. Formal schooling ended for him around the seventh grade, and he went looking for work with engines instead of books.

Like many young men in Oklahoma at the time, he found that work in the oil fields, doing hard, dangerous roughneck labor on the rigs.

That career, and his eyesight, ended in a single morning. A chip of steel flew off the rig and struck him in the left eye. Infection set in, and with 1920s medicine it threatened to spread to the other eye. To save his vision, doctors removed the left eye entirely, leaving him with one good eye and no natural depth perception - seemingly the worst possible disability for a future pilot.

How Did a One-Eyed Man Become a Pilot?

Instead of quitting, Post used the roughly $1,800 settlement from the eye injury to buy an airplane. The money he received for losing his eye went straight into the one pursuit everyone said he could never manage.

Then he retrained his brain to judge distance without binocular vision. Depth perception isn’t only about having two eyes - the brain also reads the size of known objects, the way objects move against the background, and the angle of the ground rising to meet the aircraft. Post relearned all of it, and he became so skilled at judging a landing flare with one eye that pilots with two good eyes couldn’t match him.

He built experience the hard way: barnstorming, wing walking for a flying circus, and parachute jumping to stay in the air and stay fed. Eventually he landed a job flying for a wealthy Oklahoma oilman named F. C. Hall.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

Hall owned a brand-new Lockheed Vega, and it became the most important airplane of Post’s life.

The Vega was radical for its era. While most aircraft of the 1920s were wire-braced biplanes built from steel tube and spruce wrapped in fabric - draggy and slow - the Vega used a wooden monocoque fuselage, meaning the smooth molded-plywood skin itself carried the structural load. It had a cantilevered high wing with no struts at all. The clean design let it fly fast and carry a heavy load on the modest horsepower of the day.

Hall named the airplane the Winnie Mae, after his daughter, and handed it to his one-eyed pilot.

When Did Wiley Post First Fly Around the World?

In 1931, Post teamed with an Australian navigator named Harold Gatty, one of the finest navigators alive. It was a smart pairing: Post was a superb pilot but a poor navigator, while Gatty could find their way across the globe.

Together they flew the Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days, 15 hours. That shattered the previous record of roughly 21 days, set by the airship Graf Zeppelin. Two men in a small wooden Lockheed had cut the record by more than half.

They returned as heroes to a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, a meeting with the President, and a book deal.

How Did Wiley Post Fly Solo Around the World?

For most people, the 1931 record would have been enough. Post instead set out to do it alone - a feat everyone said was impossible, because no single person could fly, navigate, and go without sleep for a week straight and survive.

Post solved the problem with technology rather than endurance alone. He acquired two pieces of cutting-edge equipment:

A radio direction finder, to home in on ground stations and track his bearing.
An experimental Sperry gyroscopic autopilot, which held the wings level and maintained a heading while he rested. He called it his “mechanical Mr. Gatty.”

That autopilot - in 1933 - is the direct ancestor of the automated systems flying today’s Cessnas and airliners.

He also trained his body for sleep deprivation. For weeks beforehand, he deliberately scrambled his sleep schedule so his body wasn’t tied to any time of day, teaching himself to survive on catnaps of twenty minutes to an hour. One famous trick: he tied a wrench to one finger with a string, so if he dozed off, his hand would relax, the wrench would drop, and the tug would jolt him awake.

What Happened During the 1933 Solo Flight?

In July 1933, Post pointed the Winnie Mae east out of New York and flew alone into a grueling ordeal.

The cockpit was brutal. A Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine hammered away with no sound insulation, vibrating through his whole body for hours on end. There was no bathroom, no galley, and no relief pilot - just Post, a jug of water, and whatever he could reach without letting go of the airplane. The real enemy wasn’t the weather that repeatedly tried to kill him; it was exhaustion.

He crossed the Atlantic, reached Berlin, then pushed on across the vast, lonely expanse of the Soviet Union, landing on muddy fields and rough strips where crowds swarmed the plane and no one spoke his language. In Alaska, on the way home, a rough landing bent the propeller and landing gear. He had parts brought in, beat the prop roughly straight, and kept going.

On July 22, 1933, Post brought the Winnie Mae back down in New York. His time: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - flown entirely alone, and faster than he and Gatty had managed together two years earlier. A crowd of 50,000 people mobbed him on the field.

What Did Wiley Post Invent After His Solo Flight?

Post kept pushing - this time upward. He became fascinated with high-altitude flight, where thin, smooth air lets an aircraft fly faster on less fuel. The obstacles were that a pilot can’t breathe or survive the cold up there, and no cockpit of the day could be pressurized.

So Post invented the pressure suit. Working with the B. F. Goodrich company, he built a rubber-and-fabric suit with a metal helmet fed by oxygen, turning his own body’s enclosure into a pressure vessel even when the aircraft around him wasn’t. It featured a round helmet with a small porthole for his one good eye.

Wearing it, Post took the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet. There he discovered a fast river of wind blowing from the west at hundreds of miles per hour - the jet stream, the same phenomenon airline dispatchers use to route flights today.

That pressure suit also traces a direct line forward to the spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore on the Moon. Post’s design came first.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

In the summer of 1935, Post built a hybrid Lockheed aircraft mounted on large pontoon floats to scout an air route through Alaska and on to Russia. He brought along a friend who was one of the most famous men in America - the cowboy humorist, newspaper columnist, and movie star Will Rogers.

The two flew north, hopping from lake to lake. On a gray August evening near Point Barrow, at the top of the world, they landed on a lagoon to ask local Eskimo hunters for directions. Just after taking off again - low and slow - the engine quit cold. Nose-heavy on the big floats, the airplane dropped a wing and went straight into the shallow water. Both men were killed.

Wiley Post was 36 years old.

Where Is the Winnie Mae Today?

The Winnie Mae outlived her pilot. The same white Lockheed Vega that circled the globe twice and touched the edge of space now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Stand beneath her wing and you’re looking at the very plywood a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck bet his life on, more than once, and won.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post overcame the loss of his left eye, deep poverty, and a seventh-grade education to become one of history’s greatest long-distance pilots.
He flew around the world twice in the Winnie Mae - with navigator Harold Gatty in 1931 (8 days, 15 hours) and solo in July 1933 (7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes).
Post was a pioneering innovator, betting his life on an early Sperry autopilot and inventing the first practical pressure suit with B. F. Goodrich.
Flying above 40,000 feet, he became one of the first aviators to discover the jet stream.
Post died in a 1935 crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside humorist Will Rogers, at age 36; the Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.