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

Wiley Post flew solo around the entire planet in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - landing back at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 22, 1933, nearly a full day faster than the record he himself had set two years earlier. He did it with one eye, a borrowed airplane packed so full of fuel it barely cleared the field fence on departure, and a wrist-string wakeup system he invented because no one else had thought to solve the problem of sleeping while flying alone.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born in Texas in 1898 and raised in Oklahoma. He worked the oil fields as a young man - hard labor, long hours, modest pay. In 1926, a drilling accident sent metal shrapnel into his left eye. He lost the eye entirely.

Workers’ compensation paid him $1,800. Post used nearly every dollar of it for flying lessons.

He earned his license, found work as a stunt pilot and parachutist at county fairs, and eventually caught a break when F.C. Hall, an Oklahoma oil millionaire, hired him as a personal pilot. Hall owned a custom-built Lockheed Vega - a sleek high-wing monoplane with a Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine - named the Winnie Mae after his daughter.

How Post Built His Reputation: The 1930 National Air Races

Post flew the Winnie Mae everywhere Hall needed to go, but he was also studying her - feeling every power change, every quirk in the controls, thinking about what she could do beyond carrying a businessman to his next meeting.

In 1930, he entered the Winnie Mae in the National Air Races transcontinental speed derby from Los Angeles to Chicago. He won. That victory gave him the credibility and the confidence to propose something much larger.

The First Circumnavigation: Post and Gatty, 1931

The first aerial circumnavigation of the globe had been completed in 1924 by the United States Army Air Service - four biplanes, multiple pilots, a massive international support operation, and 175 days to complete the circuit. Post was not interested in expeditions. He was interested in speed.

He partnered with Harold Gatty, an Australian navigator who worked dead reckoning and celestial navigation with exceptional precision. Together they planned an eastbound route: New York across the Atlantic to England, across Europe and Russia, through Siberia, over the Bering Sea to Alaska, and back south to New York.

In June 1931, they departed from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same field Lindbergh had left from four years before - and circled the globe in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. New York gave them a ticker-tape parade.

But Gatty had navigated. Post had flown. He could not stop thinking about whether he could do both at once.

Engineering the Solo Attempt: Navigation, Sleep, and the Airplane

Post spent two years methodically solving every problem a solo circumnavigation presented.

Navigation. He planned to follow the Trans-Siberian Railway from the air when weather allowed, and trust his compass, his watch, and dead reckoning when it did not. He worked with radio direction finding stations along the route and memorized fuel burn rates at various altitudes and headwinds.

Sleep. Post worked with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to install an autopilot in the Winnie Mae. The Sperry unit held heading and altitude but drifted and needed watching. Post planned to sleep in short intervals, using a simple wakeup system: a small object held loosely in hand, with a string attached to his wrist that would tug him awake when his grip relaxed. Crude, but effective.

The airplane. Hall donated the Winnie Mae for the solo attempt. Post had the engine completely rebuilt, fitted extra fuel tanks throughout the cabin, and stripped the cockpit of anything nonessential. Fully loaded, she weighed close to two tons - roughly 400 pounds more than Lockheed had ever designed her to carry.

The Solo Departure: Floyd Bennett Field, July 15, 1933

Before dawn on July 15, 1933, Post taxied to the runway at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Witnesses said the airplane barely broke ground. One account claims the wheels clipped a telephone wire on the departure end of the field.

He crossed the Atlantic to Berlin, where fog had closed his planned route into the Soviet Union. He waited, refueled, ate, slept a few hours in the airplane, then departed again.

Crossing Russia and the Bering Sea

The Soviet legs were the longest and hardest. Post flew east by following the Trans-Siberian Railway from the air when the sky was clear enough to see it. When it was not, he flew on instruments and dead reckoning.

He landed at Novosibirsk. At Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. At Yakutsk, far to the north, where the ground crew spoke no English and Post spoke no Russian - but there was fuel, and men who understood airplanes, and they worked it out.

The Bering Sea crossing brought thick fog that swallowed the horizon. Post descended toward the water, found the surface, and flew east by contact - following coastlines and patches of visibility. He landed at Fairbanks, Alaska, ahead of the pace he and Gatty had set two years before.

The Record Landing: Floyd Bennett Field, July 22, 1933

Near the end of the flight, Post’s perception had softened from exhaustion. He spotted a field from the air in New York State, set the Winnie Mae down in a meadow, walked to a farmhouse, and asked where he was. The farm family fed him and let him sleep for a few hours. Then he went back to the airplane and flew the last leg to Brooklyn.

He landed at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes after departing. He had beaten his own around-the-world record by nearly a full day. The crowds were bigger than 1931, because this time he had done it alone.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

Most histories of Post skip from the solo record to his death. What happened in between deserves equal attention.

Post had observed during the circumnavigation that the upper atmosphere contained winds from west to east of extraordinary strength - winds so powerful that a pilot who could reach them could cover ground at speeds far beyond what any propeller aircraft could achieve on its own. He was describing, without the formal vocabulary, the jet stream: the river of fast-moving air through the upper troposphere that aviation uses today to shave hours off transcontinental routes.

To fly at those altitudes required a pressurized suit. No cockpit of that era was pressurized, and the atmosphere above 20,000 feet cannot sustain a human being without assistance.

The First Pressure Suit: Post and B.F. Goodrich, 1934–1935

Post went to the B.F. Goodrich Company and described what he needed. They built it - three attempts, three suits, each one better than the last. The final version was a rubberized fabric garment with a hard metal helmet and built-in oxygen ports. It looked like something from a science fiction pulp magazine. It was unlike anything aviation had produced.

Post wore it. He flew the Winnie Mae above 30,000 feet and confirmed the high-altitude winds were real, demonstrating that stratospheric flight was achievable with the right equipment.

What Post and B.F. Goodrich developed between 1934 and 1935 is a direct ancestor of every pressure garment worn by high-altitude military pilots and every astronaut since. He was solving tomorrow’s problem while most of aviation was still congratulating him on yesterday’s achievement.

The Death of Wiley Post

Post died on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska. He was flying a patchwork floatplane carrying his friend Will Rogers, the beloved humorist and radio personality. The airplane had been assembled from mismatched components; the floats were large and heavy for the airframe. On takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, the engine quit. The airplane nosed over. Both men were killed.

Post was 36 years old.

The country mourned Will Rogers as one of the most beloved Americans of his generation. Those who cared about flying grieved Post in a particular way - they understood what he had been in the process of figuring out, and that he would not get to finish it.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post flew solo around the world on July 15–22, 1933, completing the circuit in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes from Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn - nearly a day faster than his own prior record.
• Post lost his left eye in a 1926 oil rig accident and used the $1,800 workers’ compensation settlement for flying lessons, launching one of aviation’s most consequential careers.
• His solo circumnavigation required solving three engineering problems no one had addressed before: solo navigation across Russia, in-flight sleep management using a Sperry autopilot, and a severely overloaded Lockheed Vega.
• Post identified what we now call the jet stream from observations made during the flight - high-altitude west-to-east winds capable of dramatically increasing aircraft groundspeed.
• Working with B.F. Goodrich, Post developed the first practical pressure suit between 1934 and 1935, a direct technological ancestor of modern high-altitude pilot suits and astronaut pressure garments.

Sources: Terry Gwynn-Jones, “Farther and Faster: Aviation’s Adventuring Years”; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where the Winnie Mae is on permanent display.