Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the One-Eyed Pilot Who Found the Jet Stream Before Anyone Knew What It Was

Wiley Post flew solo around the world in 1933, discovered what we now call the jet stream, and built the first practical pressure suit - all before dying at age 36. Every modern pressure suit, every transatlantic routing that exploits upper-level winds, and every commercial flight path optimized for the jet stream traces back to a one-eyed pilot from the Oklahoma oil fields who refused to stop climbing.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was not an obvious candidate for greatness. He stood five feet ten, built like a laborer, with a glass eye in his left socket and a formal education that ended before eighth grade. He grew up in poverty in Texas and Oklahoma and came to aviation through barnstorming - first as a parachutist jumping from open cockpits at county fairs, then as a pilot.

What set Post apart was not his background but his instincts. He had a nearly physical feel for an airplane, combined with the grinding stubbornness that early aviation demanded of everyone who wanted to survive long enough to matter.

How Did Wiley Post Lose His Eye - and Buy His First Airplane?

In October 1926, Post was working in the Oklahoma oil fields to save money for an airplane. A metal chip from a drilling bit struck him in the left eye. He was 27 years old. The eye could not be saved.

He sued the oil company and won. The settlement was $1,800. He spent every cent of it on a war-surplus Curtiss JN-4D biplane - the old Jenny trainer. He earned his pilot’s license flying with one eye, which the licensing authorities apparently decided was not a fight they needed to have. He went barnstorming.

What Was the Winnie Mae?

Post’s skill caught the attention of F.C. Hall, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who hired him as a personal pilot. In 1928, Hall purchased a brand-new Lockheed Vega - a wood monocoque high-wing monoplane, clean and fast, the best executive transport Lockheed built at the time. Hall named it the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

The Vega’s Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine produced around 220 horsepower and could push the aircraft past 200 miles per hour in clean air. Hall let Post race it. Post won.

At the 1930 National Air Races in Chicago, Post flew the Winnie Mae in the Bendix Trophy - a transcontinental point-to-point race from Los Angeles to Chicago. He won and set a transcontinental record. The aviation world started paying attention.

Wiley Post’s First Around-the-World Record (With Harold Gatty)

The first aerial circumnavigation had been completed in 1924 by an Army Air Service crew flying Douglas World Cruisers with global logistics support. That flight took more than five months. Post wanted to do it in days.

He found a navigator: Harold Gatty, an Australian-born expert in dead reckoning and celestial navigation. Post would fly. Gatty would navigate.

They departed Floyd Bennett Field, New York on June 23, 1931, flying northeast over the North Atlantic to England, then across Europe and Russia into Siberia, across the Pacific to Alaska, and back to New York. The flight took 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes - a new around-the-world record. President Hoover received them at the White House. For a brief period, Wiley Post was one of the most famous men in America.

How Did Wiley Post Complete the First Solo Around-the-World Flight?

What bothered Post was that he had needed Gatty. Without a navigator, he would have been wandering. He wanted to do it alone.

The core problem was sleep. Flying solo around the world means flying for days. You cannot sleep and fly simultaneously - not without an autopilot.

The Sperry Corporation had been developing automatic pilot systems since the 1910s. Lawrence Sperry had publicly demonstrated an early version in 1914, standing in the cockpit with hands raised to prove the controls were flying themselves. By the early 1930s, the gyropilot could hold a heading in smooth air.

Post spent months with Sperry engineers adapting the gyropilot for the Winnie Mae. He also stripped the aircraft of everything removable and added fuel tanks until the gross weight was at the edge of what the airframe could handle on takeoff. No navigator. No extra gear. Just fuel, weather information, and one good eye.

On July 15, 1933, at two in the morning, Post taxied to the end of the runway at Floyd Bennett Field and disappeared into the darkness headed northeast. He flew for 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 and a half minutes.

He landed back at Floyd Bennett Field to a crowd that had waited through the night. He was exhausted and sick. The Winnie Mae’s engine was running rough. Her left main gear tire was flat from a soft-field landing in Siberia. She had made it.

How Did Wiley Post Discover the Jet Stream?

On the high-altitude legs over Russia and Siberia during his record flights, Post noticed something that his weather charts could not explain. When he climbed above 20,000 feet, the Winnie Mae picked up tailwinds far stronger than anything his forecasters had predicted. The airplane was accelerating through smooth, calm air with no visible meteorological cause.

Post kept the observations and kept thinking. To investigate properly, he needed to reach altitudes above 30,000 feet. The problem was physiological: at that altitude, atmospheric pressure drops to roughly one-third of sea level. An unprotected human loses consciousness in seconds and dies in minutes.

The solution was a pressure suit.

The First Pressure Suit: Post and Goodrich

Post went to the Goodrich Rubber Company and worked with their engineers to build a suit that could maintain pressure around his body at extreme altitude. Three suits were built. The first burst when pressurized on the ground. The second had persistent leaks. The third worked.

It was not elegant - a rubber suit with a pigskin outer layer and a metal helmet with small glass observation windows. Post described it as flying inside a sausage. His glass eye made the helmet seal imperfect and caused him constant trouble. He sweated through every flight. He flew it anyway.

In 1934 and 1935, Post made a series of high-altitude flights over the continental United States in a modified Lockheed Vega. He climbed above 40,000 feet. There he found the same extraordinary winds he had noticed over Siberia - rivers of air moving at 150 to 200 miles per hour from west to east at altitudes above the tropopause.

Wiley Post had discovered the jet stream. He had no name for it. The meteorologists who analyzed his findings later would supply that. But Post knew something was up there that nobody had mapped, and it was fast.

Why Does Wiley Post’s Legacy Matter to Aviation and Space?

The pressure suit Post developed with Goodrich was not a dead end. It was the beginning of a direct lineage. The suits worn by X-15 pilots in the 1960s. The suits worn by the Mercury astronauts. The suits in use on the International Space Station today. Every one of them descends from that rubber-and-pigskin contraption Post wore over Oklahoma at 40,000 feet.

The jet stream discovery reshaped long-range bomber routing in World War II and commercial airline economics for the century that followed. Every transatlantic flight that runs faster eastbound than westbound is exploiting exactly what Post found.

He never received credit commensurate with the work. Not the way Lindbergh received credit for the Atlantic crossing, or Yeager for Mach 1. Post was a rough-edged farm kid with a glass eye and a third-grade education, and the aviation establishment of his era was not built to celebrate that kind of pioneer.

How Did Wiley Post Die?

Post died on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska. He was flying with Will Rogers, the American humorist and radio personality who was his close friend. They were en route to visit a remote settlement in a heavily modified floatplane - a Lockheed fuselage fitted with oversized floats that some engineers considered mismatched to the nose-heavy weight of the large Wasp engine up front.

Post stopped at a lagoon near Barrow to ask directions from an Inuit settlement onshore. On takeoff, the nose dropped. The aircraft went into the water. Both men died instantly.

Wiley Post was 36 years old.

The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., still in her original cream and purple paint. She looks small when you stand next to her.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post completed the first solo around-the-world flight on July 15–22, 1933, covering the route in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49.5 minutes from Floyd Bennett Field, New York.
• He had previously set the around-the-world record with navigator Harold Gatty in 1931 (8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes), then wanted to prove he could do it alone.
• During high-altitude flights in 1934–35, Post discovered the jet stream - rivers of air moving at 150–200 mph above 30,000 feet - before meteorologists had a name for the phenomenon.
• The pressure suit Post built with Goodrich Rubber Company is the direct ancestor of every pressure suit and space suit that followed, including those used on the International Space Station.
• Post lost his left eye in a 1926 oil field accident, received an $1,800 settlement, and used it to buy his first airplane - the entire arc of his career began with that single decision.