Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Around-the-World Flight That Stumbled Into the Jet Stream

Wiley Post flew around the world alone in 1933 - one eye, a borrowed autopilot, and a piece of string tied to his wrist to wake him when he fell asleep. In doing so, he became the first person to complete a solo circumnavigation and, somewhere above Siberia at 25,000 feet, noticed something no one had fully described before: the atmosphere had a river in it. That discovery, recorded in a frostbitten logbook, eventually shaped every transatlantic flight plan filed today.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born in 1898 in Grand Plain, Texas, to a farming family that relocated to Oklahoma when he was young. He had no aviation background - he grew up working cattle and picking cotton, developing an intuitive gift for machinery along the way.

He saw his first airplane at a county fair in 1913, at age 15. He left no extensive account of the moment, but he later described a physical reaction to seeing that airplane - something that permanently redirected him.

Flying required money he didn’t have, so he went into the oil fields.

The Accident That Funded His Career

In 1926, a drilling accident struck Post in the left eye with a piece of metal. The eye could not be saved. The oil company paid $1,800 in workers’ compensation.

He bought an airplane.

This detail deserves attention. Losing sight in one eye fundamentally alters depth perception - the spatial triangulation a pilot depends on during the flare, during low approaches, during any phase of flight where judging distance from the ground matters. Most pilots in that situation would lose their certificate.

Post spent roughly six months retraining his visual judgment. He used runway markings as reference geometry. He logged hundreds of practice hours. He barnstormed county fairs and did parachute jumps for crowds. He got good enough that his reputation reached an Oklahoma oil millionaire named F.C. Hall.

Hall needed a personal pilot. He bought a new Lockheed Vega, had it painted white, and named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter. Then he hired Wiley Post to fly it.

The Lockheed Vega: Right Airplane at the Right Time

The Vega was a significant machine for its era. Designed by Jack Northrop and built by Lockheed, it featured an all-wood monocoque fuselage - a clean, egg-shaped body with no external bracing, which was unusual in the late 1920s. Power came from a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine producing approximately 420 horsepower, giving it a cruise speed of 140 to 150 mph and a service ceiling approaching 20,000 feet.

Amelia Earhart flew a Vega on her solo transatlantic crossing in 1932. Pan American used them for early route surveys. The aircraft was capable, reliable, and well-suited to the kind of long-distance flying that was beginning to define the era.

The 1931 Record: Post and Gatty Around the World

In 1931, Post flew the Winnie Mae around the world with navigator Harold Gatty, an Australian specialist in rapid airborne celestial navigation. Together, they completed the circumnavigation - New York to London, across Europe, across Russia, across Siberia, across Alaska, across Canada, and back - in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes.

The previous record had been set by the German zeppelin Graf Zeppelin at 21 days. New York gave Post and Gatty a ticker-tape parade. Congress passed a resolution of congratulation.

Post was 32 years old. He was already planning to do it again - without Gatty.

The Solo Attempt: Solving Two Problems

The people around Post thought the solo plan was unreasonable. The route covered roughly 15,000 miles. Weather forecasting in 1933 provided limited reliability over Siberia. Airfields across the Soviet Far East and Alaska were whatever local and military initiative had managed to prepare. Fuel quality was inconsistent. Radio communication existed in name more than in practice over most of the route.

Post had two specific problems to solve before he could attempt it.

Navigation was the first. Without Gatty, he would be flying dead reckoning - magnetic compass, airspeed indicator, clock, and visual landmarks. He had flown the route once. He knew what it looked like from altitude.

Sleep was the second. The journey would take the better part of eight days. The math was simple: at some point, Post would fall asleep in the cockpit. If nothing was flying the airplane when that happened, the airplane would not recover.

His solution was a Sperry gyroscope-based autopilot - new technology in 1933. It was not sophisticated by any modern measure. It held a heading and maintained rough altitude, but it drifted and developed inconsistencies. Post spent months learning its behavior precisely, understanding when to trust it and when to override it.

He also devised his own backup: a length of cord tied to the control yoke and looped around one of his fingers. If he fell into deep sleep and his hand relaxed, the yoke would drift forward as the nose dropped, and the cord would jerk his hand awake.

Departure and the Route East

On July 15, 1933, before dawn, Post climbed into the Winnie Mae at Floyd Bennett Field in New York and flew east.

The Atlantic crossing took roughly 25 hours. He landed in Berlin, refueled, slept briefly on a hangar cot, ate something, and got back in the airplane.

Moscow came next. Soviet officials met him with a translator and apparent bewilderment at the enterprise. He shook hands, answered a few questions, refueled, and kept moving.

Novosibirsk, where fuel had been pre-positioned through diplomatic effort and the airfield was packed earth.

Irkutsk, in the Siberian interior at 4,000 feet elevation, surrounded by mountains, in fog. Post landed blind, taxied to the fuel, looked at the birch forests pressing against the field boundary, and waited. The fog lifted. He flew.

Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East. By this point, sleep deprivation was becoming a serious adversary. Post later wrote that between Irkutsk and Khabarovsk the world began losing definition - colors slightly wrong, sounds arriving with a fractional delay. He was eating hardtack and cold coffee and relying on the cord at his wrist to keep him flying.

The Discovery Above Siberia

At altitude - above 20,000 feet, sometimes above 25,000 feet - Post was recording groundspeeds that didn’t match his fuel consumption. He knew the Winnie Mae’s performance intimately. He knew what the Wasp engine could produce at various power settings. The numbers were significantly wrong. The airplane was moving faster than any combination of engine output and tailwind he could account for.

Something at altitude was pushing her west to east with unusual force.

This phenomenon had been glimpsed before. Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi had made measurements in the 1920s suggesting strong high-altitude winds above Japan, but the observations hadn’t been synthesized into a coherent picture, and the term jet stream didn’t yet exist in English.

What Post grasped, flying above the Siberian taiga with frostbitten hands, was that the upper atmosphere wasn’t still air. It was a river - powerful, persistent, moving west to east at velocities that could push a small airplane across a continent faster than any engine could manage alone. If you were willing to fly high enough and suffer the cold and the altitude to stay in it, the sky paid you back.

He recorded it in his logbook. He would publish it when he got home.

Across Alaska and Home

Post crossed into Alaska at Nome, then Fairbanks - where he slept three hours in the cockpit because it was the fastest option - then flew south into Canada.

Edmonton. Civilized airfields, reliable fuel, working radio. He ate a real meal, drank coffee, and took off again.

On July 22, 1933, 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes after leaving Floyd Bennett Field, Post brought the Winnie Mae home. He circled the field once, flew a normal final, and landed.

He had beaten his own record - set with Gatty two years earlier - by nearly a full day. He had done it alone.

Post climbed out, shook a few hands, said something modest to a microphone, and sat down on the tarmac. He was asleep before anyone could lead him inside.

What the Flight Actually Changed

The aftershocks spread for years.

Post’s notes on high-altitude wind patterns became foundational material for the emerging science of jet stream meteorology. The military studied them. The airlines studied them. Today, every dispatcher routing a transatlantic flight along the North Atlantic Tracks to save fuel on a westerly, every pilot filing for FL390 to catch a favorable push, is working from something that traces back to those logbook entries above Siberia.

Post’s experience at altitude also convinced him that the human body - not the airframe, not the engine - was the limiting factor in high-altitude flight. He went to the Goodrich company with a specific engineering problem: build a suit that could maintain pressure around a human body at altitudes where ambient pressure would otherwise be fatal.

They built three generations of prototype over three years. The third worked.

That pressure suit was the direct ancestor of the gear worn by U-2 pilots over the Soviet Union in the 1950s, by SR-71 Blackbird crews pushing past Mach 3, by X-15 pilots who briefly left the atmosphere entirely, and by the astronauts who suited up at Kennedy Space Center before the hatch closed.

The Final Flight

The hard coda: two years after his solo circumnavigation, Wiley Post was dead.

On August 15, 1935, Post and his friend Will Rogers - the cowboy philosopher who was perhaps the most beloved public figure in America that summer - were killed near Point Barrow, Alaska. Post had acquired a hybrid floatplane design, and shortly after takeoff from a lake near Point Barrow, the engine failed. The aircraft went into the water.

Post was 36. Rogers was 55.

The Winnie Mae was not aboard. She survived, and today hangs on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington - near the Spirit of St. Louis and not far from the Wright Flyer. She earned her place among them.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo around-the-world flight on July 22, 1933, covering the route in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - nearly a day faster than his own 1931 record set with navigator Harold Gatty.
Flying above 25,000 feet over Siberia, Post observed groundspeeds his engine couldn’t account for, documenting what would later be identified as the jet stream - a discovery that shapes transatlantic routing to this day.
Post solved the sleep problem with a Sperry autopilot and a cord tied to his wrist - if his hand relaxed in sleep, the dropping nose would tug the cord and wake him.
His post-flight research with the Goodrich company produced the first functional pressure suit, the direct ancestor of gear worn by U-2 pilots, SR-71 crews, X-15 pilots, and astronauts.
The Winnie Mae, a Lockheed Vega powered by a Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine, is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.