Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oklahoman Who Flew Around the World Alone and Went Looking for the River of Wind in the Sky

Wiley Post was a one-eyed Oklahoma pilot who became the first person to fly solo around the world, in 1933. Beyond that record, he pioneered technologies that shaped modern aviation: he helped prove the existence of the jet stream and invented the first practical pressure suit, the direct ancestor of the suits worn by test pilots and astronauts. His story is far bigger than the Alaska crash most people remember.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was born in Texas in 1898 and grew up dirt-poor in the cotton country of Oklahoma. He hated farming, and a chance encounter changed his life: as a teenager at a county fair, he watched a barnstormer swoop down out of the sky in a Curtiss pusher. From that moment, he wanted only to fly.

He had no money and little schooling - he left the classroom after the sixth grade. He drifted through odd jobs, worked the oil fields, and even served a short stretch in jail for stealing a car. Then, in 1926, an accident redirected everything.

How Did Wiley Post Fly With Only One Eye?

While working a drilling job in 1926, a chip of metal struck Post in the left eye. Infection set in, and doctors removed the eye to save the other one. For a young man who wanted nothing but to fly, it looked like the end - depth perception, the ability to judge the flare and the distance to the runway, is fundamental to flying, and conventional wisdom said it required two eyes.

Post refused to accept that. He took his workman’s compensation settlement of about $1,800 and bought an airplane with it. Then he taught himself, patiently and deliberately, to judge distance with a single eye - studying how a fence post looked against the trees behind it, how shadows fell, how the apparent size of an object revealed its distance.

He rebuilt his own depth perception from scratch. In time, he could land as smoothly on a pasture strip as most pilots with perfect vision. He wore a white eye patch for the rest of his life, and it became his trademark.

The Winnie Mae and the First Round-the-World Flight

Post’s luck turned when he became the personal pilot for wealthy Oklahoma oilman F.C. Hall. Hall bought a Lockheed Vega - a sleek, all-wood high-wing monoplane with a canoe-smooth fuselage, no struts, and no external bracing wires. He named her the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

In 1930, Post flew the Winnie Mae to victory in the National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago. That win sparked a bigger ambition: to fly around the world and set a speed record. A trip around the globe by air had been done once before, by the German airship Graf Zeppelin in 1929, but never quickly in an airplane.

Post recruited an Australian navigator, Harold Gatty, one of the world’s finest at fixing a position with a sextant, a watch, and careful arithmetic. In June 1931, the two lifted off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same field Lindbergh had left four years earlier - and raced across the top of the world: Newfoundland, the Atlantic, England, Germany, then the long grind across Russia and Siberia.

One incident captures the man. Somewhere in Siberia, the Winnie Mae bogged down in mud, nosed over, and bent her propeller. With no spare and no mechanic within a thousand miles, Post and Gatty removed the prop and hammered it back into shape using hand tools and a fallen log for an anvil. They bolted it on and flew on.

They landed back on Long Island 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes after departing - around the entire world. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade, and the President shook their hands.

Wiley Post’s Solo Flight Around the World

Post wasn’t satisfied. On the first trip, Gatty had done the navigating while Post flew. Post began to wonder whether he could circle the globe alone - flying, navigating, and staying awake for days with no one to spell him.

The great enemy of a solo flight is fatigue; a tired pilot is a dead pilot. So Post turned to technology. He installed one of the earliest Sperry gyroscopic autopilots - an experimental unit, heavy as an anvil, that could hold the airplane straight and level while he catnapped or worked over his charts. He added a radio direction finder to help him home in on stations. In that wooden airplane, he was assembling the beginnings of the automated cockpit.

He also relied on a low-tech trick to stay awake: he tied a wrench to one finger with string. When he dozed off and his hand relaxed, the wrench dropped and yanked his finger, snapping him awake.

In July 1933, Post flew the same brutal route alone. He came home in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - beating his own record by nearly a full day. Fifty thousand people were waiting at the field.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

On his long flights, Post noticed that at high altitude there was sometimes a fast-moving current of air - a “river of wind.” Flying into it in the right direction pushed the airplane along, letting it burn less fuel and cover more ground. Today we call it the jet stream. Every airline captain riding an eastbound tailwind across the country is using a river of wind that Post went looking for on purpose, back when few believed it existed.

But exploiting it meant flying very high - above 30,000 and 40,000 feet - and that created a deadly problem. The Winnie Mae was wooden and couldn’t be pressurized; sealing and inflating the cabin would tear her apart. At those altitudes, without protection, there simply isn’t enough air, and a person cannot survive.

Wiley Post Invented the First Pressure Suit

With a sixth-grade education, Post set out to solve the problem himself. Working with the B.F. Goodrich company, he developed a suit built from rubber and rubberized fabric: an inner bladder to hold pressure around the body, an outer garment to keep its shape, and a metal helmet with a small viewing window bolted on top. It looked like a deep-sea diver’s rig from a comic book.

The early attempts failed - one suit swelled and locked so tightly around him that he had to be cut out of it. But the third suit worked. Wearing it, Post took the Winnie Mae above 40,000 feet, higher than anyone had flown and lived to describe it, breathing on his own inside a suit he had invented.

That suit was the ancestor of every high-altitude pressure suit that followed - the ones worn by test pilots on the edge of space and by the astronauts who traveled to the Moon. It traces straight back to a one-eyed Oklahoman and a rubber company chasing an invisible wind.

The Death of Wiley Post and Will Rogers

By 1935, Post had a new goal: surveying an air-mail and passenger route from the West Coast up through Alaska and on to Russia. For the job he built a hybrid airplane, mating a Lockheed Orion fuselage to the longer wings of another model and fitting large pontoon floats for water landings. Some who examined it later judged it nose-heavy.

Along for the trip was Post’s close friend Will Rogers - the beloved cowboy humorist, newspaper columnist, and movie star who could poke fun at senators and presidents and have the whole country laughing along. Rogers loved to fly and came to write about the adventure.

On August 15, 1935, the two were near Point Barrow, Alaska, at the very top of the continent. In fog and low clouds, they landed on a lagoon to ask directions, got their bearings, and took off again for the short hop into Barrow. Just after liftoff, low over the water, the engine quit. With a nose-heavy airplane and no altitude to work with, there was nothing to be done. She dropped a wing, nosed down, and struck the shallow lagoon. Both men were killed instantly.

Wiley Post was 36 years old. The nation stopped; mourners stood along the railroad tracks with their hats off as the bodies came home.

Why Wiley Post Still Matters

It would be easy to let the crash at Point Barrow be the whole picture, but that does the man a disservice. The real Wiley Post is the young roughneck teaching himself to see with one eye, the pilot straightening a bent propeller on a log in Siberia, the aviator with a wrench tied to his finger flying alone around the world, and the inventor sweating inside a rubber suit to touch a wind nobody could see.

Every time a pilot climbs to altitude and picks up a tailwind home, that’s Post. Every time an autopilot holds steady while a pilot sorts something out, that’s Post. And every astronaut who ever wore a pressure suit owes a quiet debt to a man who never finished grade school.

The Winnie Mae survives. She hangs today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. - that beautiful wooden Vega, right where she belongs.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post (1898–1935) lost his left eye in a 1926 oilfield accident, taught himself to judge distance with one eye, and became one of the most accomplished pilots of his era.
Flying the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae, he circled the globe with navigator Harold Gatty in 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes in 1931, then flew solo around the world in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes in 1933.
On the solo flight he pioneered cockpit automation using an early Sperry autopilot and a radio direction finder.
He helped prove the existence of the jet stream and, with B.F. Goodrich, invented the first practical pressure suit - the ancestor of modern high-altitude and spacesuits.
Post died with humorist Will Rogers in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, on August 15, 1935; the Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.