Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Oklahoman Who Found the Jet Stream, Flew Solo Around the World, and Built the Pressure Suit That Every Astronaut Would Wear After Him

Wiley Post flew around the world twice, discovered the polar jet stream as an exploitable flight path, and personally designed and tested the first successful pressure suit - all before his death in 1935 at age 36. Every commercial transatlantic route, every high-altitude aircraft program, and every astronaut who has ever suited up owes something to a one-eyed oil field worker from Oklahoma with $1,800 in workers’ compensation money and a refusal to believe any altitude was too high.

From the Oil Fields to the Cockpit

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in 1898 in Van Zandt County, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma around drilling rigs and flat red horizons. He had no college education and no formal technical training. He learned machinery the way oil field workers did - through his hands, on the job.

In 1926, a tool accident on a rig sent metal fragments into his left eye. Surgeons could not save it. The workers’ compensation settlement came to $1,800 - enough to buy a piece of land, start a small business, or make a sensible move.

Post used it to pay for flying lessons.

Barnstormer to Record Holder

Within months of learning to fly, Post was barnstorming at county fairs across Oklahoma - selling rides, doing parachute jumps, developing a precision in the air that other pilots noticed and couldn’t easily account for.

In 1928, wealthy Oklahoma oilman F.C. Hall hired Post as his personal pilot and later purchased a Lockheed Vega for the job. The Vega was a genuine achievement for its era: a high-wing monoplane with a molded plywood monocoque fuselage, a Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine, and an NACA cowling that cleaned up the airflow and added 20 to 30 miles per hour over an uncowled installation. In cruise, it pushed past 200 miles per hour. Hall named it the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

In 1930, Post flew the Winnie Mae on a transcontinental speed run from Los Angeles to New York with a stop in Chicago, breaking the existing record.

Around the World: First Flight With a Navigator

In June 1931, Post and navigator Harold Gatty departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island in the Winnie Mae. Their route ran north through Newfoundland, across the North Atlantic to England, east through Europe and into the Soviet Union, across Siberia, down through Alaska, and back across Canada to New York.

The conditions ranged from marginal to dangerous throughout. North Atlantic fog at low altitude. Siberian airfields that existed mostly on paper. Fuel availability that was uncertain at every stop.

They completed the circuit in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes - a new world record for circumnavigation by air. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade on Broadway.

Around the World: The Solo Flight

Two years later, Post returned with a harder question: could he fly the same route alone?

On July 15, 1933, he departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn at 5:30 in the morning, alone in the Winnie Mae with a new Sperry autopilot - a primitive system that maintained heading and kept the wings roughly level, but gave Post enough of a break to eat, check his charts, and sleep in short intervals.

The autopilot failed somewhere over Russia. Post landed at a remote Soviet airfield, diagnosed the fault, improvised a repair with whatever he had on board, and continued.

He touched down at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. The first solo circumnavigation of the earth.

What He Noticed That No One Else Had Mapped

This is where the record story becomes something more significant.

During both flights - particularly over Siberia and along the northern polar routes - Post noticed that the Winnie Mae was covering more ground per hour than her airspeed could account for. Significantly more. The engine and propeller were not producing those numbers. Something in the atmosphere was pushing her.

Post had found the polar jet stream.

Meteorologists were already gathering data on it from weather balloon readings and beginning to understand its structure. But no pilot had flown through it intentionally. Post was the first aviator to recognize the jet stream as a navigational phenomenon - a ribbon of fast-moving air flowing west to east at altitudes above twenty thousand feet - and to start planning how to use it deliberately on eastbound flights.

The problem was altitude. To ride the jet stream consistently, a pilot would need to fly above thirty thousand feet, possibly higher for the core of the flow.

The Pressure Suit: Three Prototypes to Change Aviation

At 30,000 feet in an unpressurized cockpit, a pilot has roughly thirty seconds of useful consciousness before hypoxia shuts the brain down. Oxygen masks help at lower altitudes, but above the mid-twenties, ambient pressure is too low for the blood to absorb oxygen at a useful rate.

Post needed a suit that would maintain pressure around his body and keep him functional in the stratosphere. He went to B.F. Goodrich in Akron, Ohio, and asked them to build one.

The first prototype was a failure - the rubber ballooned under pressure until Post could barely move his arms, the seams leaked, and he couldn’t grip the controls.

The second prototype was closer but the helmet and gloves still wouldn’t seal properly and pressurization was uneven.

The third prototype worked.

Testing at Altitude Above 30,000 Feet

In 1934 and 1935, Post flew the Winnie Mae above thirty thousand feet, repeatedly, in the new suit - a full rubberized assembly sealed at neck and wrists with a pressurized helmet attached at a collar ring. Getting into it took twenty minutes. Movement was awkward. Visibility through the helmet was limited.

He flew anyway: alone in a wooden single-engine airplane over the American Southwest, taking notes on wind speeds and upper-atmosphere behavior at altitudes no other pilot had spent sustained time at.

The pressure suit Post designed and tested over those years is the direct technical ancestor of every pressure suit that followed - the suits worn by X-15 pilots at the edge of space, by the Mercury astronauts, by every cosmonaut and astronaut since. Post had identified a technical problem, commissioned a solution, tested it himself at altitude, and proved the concept that made stratospheric and eventually space travel survivable for human beings.

Why This Matters for Pilots Today

Every commercial flight crossing North America in under five hours benefits from jet stream routing. Modern dispatchers build it into their flight plans as a matter of standard practice. That routing traces back to what a one-eyed Oklahoma barnstormer noticed in his ground speed numbers somewhere over Siberia in the early 1930s.

Post was planning to fly the jet stream at stratospheric altitude from Burbank to New York - a transcontinental speed record that would have put the phenomenon on every aviation chart in the world. He had the suit, the mapped winds, and the airplane ready.

He never made that flight.

Point Barrow: August 15, 1935

In August 1935, Post and humorist Will Rogers flew north toward Alaska in a modified aircraft - a Lockheed Orion fuselage fitted with floats from a Lockheed Sirius. The combination was nose-heavy in ways the original Orion design hadn’t accounted for. The floats shifted the center of gravity forward.

On August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow - the northernmost point of North America - the engine failed at low altitude on takeoff from a lagoon. There was no altitude to trade for airspeed and no room to recover. Both men were killed instantly.

Wiley Post was 36 years old.

The Winnie Mae and Post’s original pressure suit are both on display today at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Key Takeaways

Post flew around the world with navigator Harold Gatty in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes in 1931, then completed the first solo circumnavigation in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes in 1933.
He identified the polar jet stream as a usable navigation tool - decades before it became standard route planning for commercial aviation worldwide.
Post designed and tested the world’s first successful pressure suit with B.F. Goodrich, directly inspiring the suits worn by X-15 pilots, Mercury astronauts, and every spacesuit program that followed.
He accomplished all of this with one eye, no formal education, and $1,800 in workers’ compensation money as his starting capital.
Post was killed on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, at age 36 - before completing the stratospheric transcontinental flight he had spent years preparing for.