Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Pilot Who Flew to the Edge of Space Before Anyone Knew the Jet Stream Existed

Wiley Post - a one-eyed Oklahoma oil worker turned aviator - flew solo around the world in 1933, built the first practical pressure suit, and found the jet stream with his hands before meteorology knew it existed. He died at 36, largely overlooked outside aviation circles. His work underlies every pressurized aircraft flying today and every winds-aloft forecast you have ever checked.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born on a farm in Corinth, Texas, in 1898. His family relocated to Oklahoma, where he grew up working the oil fields. He first saw an airplane at a county fair around age 14 and, by his own account, never recovered from it.

In October 1926, a drilling accident sent a piece of flying metal into his right eye. The eye could not be saved. He walked out of a hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas, with a glass eye and $1,800 in workers’ compensation.

He used every dollar to buy a used aircraft.

How Did Post Learn to Fly With One Eye?

Monocular vision would have disqualified Post from military or commercial flying. He adapted anyway. Depth perception on approach, on landing, in close quarters - all of it required a different visual vocabulary. He learned to read speed cues and ground references that most two-eyed pilots never needed to develop.

He got very good.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

In 1930, Post went to work for Oklahoma oilman Florence Chapman Hall, who owned a Lockheed Vega - a single-engine, high-wing monoplane with a wood-and-fabric monocoque shell and a radial engine up front. Fast and aerodynamically clean by early 1930s standards. Hall named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter and hired Post as his personal pilot.

Post won the 1930 National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago in the Winnie Mae. Then both men started thinking bigger.

What Was the 1931 Around-the-World Record?

On June 23, 1931, Post and navigator Harold Gatty departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island in the Winnie Mae. They landed back there on July 1, completing a circumnavigation in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes.

They crossed the Atlantic, Europe, Russia, and the Pacific. They nearly ran out of fuel over Siberia. Landing gear sank into an Alaskan mud field; horses pulled them out. They slept in four-hour shifts when they slept at all. Ticker tape fell in New York when they returned.

Post came back two years later and did it alone.

How Did Post Fly Around the World Solo?

He departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 15, 1933 - no navigator, no copilot, and a Sperry autopilot that could hold a heading and roughly maintain altitude, and not much else. He landed and refueled at nine stops across three continents and touched back down on July 22. Total time: 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes. A new world record.

Navigation across chunks of the Soviet Union was pure dead reckoning: landmarks, a stopwatch, and whatever he could see through one eye. When fatigue set in, a string tied to his finger would jerk him awake if the aircraft deviated from level flight. Franklin Roosevelt sent a telegram. Congress took note.

How Did Post Discover the Jet Stream?

Something nagged at Post after both record flights. At altitude, the winds were extraordinary - far faster than anything meteorologists of the day could explain. He had watched the Winnie Mae’s groundspeed, tracked the fuel burn, and seen the numbers not add up. No one had a name for what he was sensing. He asked the question anyway: what is up there above 30,000 feet?

The answer was the jet stream - a narrow, high-speed river of air circling the globe at high altitude. Today, every airline dispatcher plans around it. Every commercial pilot knows it. In 1934, it had no name, barely a theory, and Wiley Post was trying to reach it in a wooden airplane.

How Did Post Build the First Pressure Suit?

The Winnie Mae could climb to roughly 20,000–25,000 feet in standard configuration. The jet stream Post was chasing lived above 40,000 feet. Pressurized cockpits didn’t exist in production aviation.

So Post pressurized himself instead.

He approached BF Goodrich and described what he needed: a sealed, pressurized garment that could simulate lower altitude while the aircraft climbed into the stratosphere, with gloves that moved and a helmet he could see through. The first suit leaked. The second had problems. The third suit worked - rubber, canvas, and improvisation. It inflated under pressure and restricted movement, but Post could work the controls. He could fly.

How High Did Post Actually Fly?

In a series of flights in 1934 and 1935, Post took the Winnie Mae to altitudes no aircraft had reached in sustained flight. Estimates place the ceiling at 50,000 feet or higher. The instruments weren’t fully reliable at those levels and some record claims are disputed, but the flights were real.

At those heights, he found his winds. One segment over the American Southwest showed a groundspeed implying a tailwind exceeding 200 mph. He had no scientific instruments calibrated for jet stream observation - just airspeed, groundspeed, fuel burn, and instinct.

The aviation establishment was politely skeptical. He was an Oklahoma oil worker with an eyepatch, not a credentialed meteorologist.

Documentation came later. During World War II, B-29 Superfortress crews flying over Japan encountered those same winds and couldn’t explain why their bomb runs were going sideways. Meteorologists eventually connected the dots - back to Wiley Post, who had been dead for years by then.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

On August 15, 1935, Post took off from a point near Point Barrow, Alaska, in a modified floatplane with a single passenger: Will Rogers, the humorist and radio personality who wanted to see the Alaskan territory from the air.

The aircraft was a hybrid - a Lockheed Orion fuselage mated to an Explorer wing and fitted with floats that were too heavy for the airframe, shifting the center of gravity into marginal territory. Visibility was poor. Shortly after takeoff, the engine quit. The aircraft nosed into a shallow lagoon.

Both men were killed instantly. Post was 36 years old.

Will Rogers was the most famous man in America at the time, and the combined deaths dominated the news for weeks. As years passed, Rogers remained a household name. Post drifted back toward the Oklahoma red dirt in national memory.

Why This Still Matters for Pilots

The Winnie Mae hangs today in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. - original, unrestored in the cosmetic sense, exactly as she flew. She is not the most visually dramatic aircraft in that building. She is among the most significant.

Every pressurized aircraft you have ever flown in - every turboprop, every jet, every airliner - has a direct engineering ancestor in the rubber suit BF Goodrich built for a one-eyed Oklahoma pilot in 1934.

Every time you pull up a winds-aloft forecast and see that fat arrow of the jet stream drawn across the North Atlantic or the Pacific, you are looking at something Wiley Post felt through the controls of the Winnie Mae before meteorology had a word for it.

Key Takeaways

Post lost his right eye in a 1926 oil field accident and used his $1,800 workers’ compensation to buy his first airplane, adapting entirely to monocular flight.
He set a solo around-the-world record in 1933 - 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes - navigating across the Soviet Union by dead reckoning with a primitive autopilot and a string tied to his finger.
Post worked with BF Goodrich to build the first practical pressure suit after three attempts, reaching estimated altitudes of 50,000 feet or higher in the Winnie Mae.
He detected tailwinds exceeding 200 mph at stratospheric altitudes - the jet stream - years before it had a name; WWII B-29 crews over Japan later confirmed what he had found.
Post died on August 15, 1935, at age 36, in a floatplane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside passenger Will Rogers; the Winnie Mae survives at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.