Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Circumnavigation That a One-Eyed Oklahoma Oilfield Worker Completed in Seven Days Eighteen Hours

On July 15, 1933, Wiley Post departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York at 12:14 AM and flew around the world alone. He landed back at the same field on July 22 in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - with one eye, a Sperry autopilot that failed over the Pacific, and a propeller that had been bent on a Soviet landing strip and straightened by hand. No co-pilot. No navigator. No second chances.

From Oklahoma Oil Patch to Cockpit

Post was born in 1898 in Smith County, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma during the oil boom. He was working rigs before he was flying airplanes. He saw his first aircraft at around age 14 when a barnstormer passed through a county fair near Lawton. That was it. But he was a farmboy from Oklahoma in 1912, and airplanes were not in the budget.

He waited. He worked. He eventually came back to the oil patch, and the oil patch nearly killed him.

In 1926, a steel splinter from a drilling operation destroyed his left eye. The damage was total. Post received an $1,800 workers’ compensation settlement.

He spent every cent of it on a used Canuck biplane.

Flying With One Eye

Post’s monocular vision meant no conventional depth perception, but he had spent years adapting to life with one eye and made it work in the cockpit. What he had was a strong spatial instinct - an unusual ability to build a three-dimensional picture of position and attitude that more than compensated. He had good hands and good judgment.

Within a few years he was barnstorming county fairs, doing parachute jumps, and flying charter for oil executives. One of those executives was F.C. Hall, an Oklahoma City oilman who recognized what a skilled, reliable pilot was worth.

Hall bought Post a brand-new Lockheed Vega in 1930. They named it Winnie Mae, after Hall’s daughter.

The Winnie Mae

The Vega was, in the early 1930s, the finest single-engine transport airplane available. Its all-wood, plywood monocoque fuselage was aerodynamically clean and well ahead of its time. A Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial up front produced 450 horsepower and pushed the airplane past 170 mph in clean air. It could carry a serious fuel load.

Post flew it the way you fly a machine you trust completely. He knew its sounds. He knew what the engine felt like when it was happy and what it felt like when something was building toward a problem.

The 1931 Record: Post and Gatty

In 1931, Post and professional navigator Harold Gatty flew the Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes, departing from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same field Lindbergh had left from four years earlier.

Gatty navigated primarily by dead reckoning: drift sight, stopwatch, and wind corrections. Over Siberia, with no radio beacons and no useful landmarks, he read the ground and the stars and trusted mathematics. They barely slept, with one stretch keeping them airborne for more than 20 hours straight.

New York gave them a ticker-tape parade. The crowd understood, in 1931, exactly what that flight represented.

Planning the Solo Attempt

Post began planning a solo attempt almost immediately after the 1931 record. The central problem was sleep. The flight would take roughly a week, and the human body cannot survive a week of wakefulness in any condition useful for flying an airplane. Reaction time degrades. Judgment degrades. Decisions that feel sound become catastrophically wrong.

He went to the Sperry Gyroscope Company for a gyroscopic autopilot that could hold heading and rough attitude without constant pilot input. It was prone to drifting and prone to failing. Post tested it, found its limits, and decided it was better than nothing.

He also worked with navigator and polar expert Bernt Balchen to develop a radio direction finding capability. Ground stations along his planned route would broadcast on assigned frequencies, allowing Post to take a bearing and plot a rough position. Over Siberia in 1933, rough position was the best anyone could offer.

Departure: 12:14 AM, July 15, 1933

Post lifted off from Floyd Bennett Field before sunrise on a summer morning and climbed out over Long Island Sound in the dark. Maximum fuel load. One pilot. A plan with no margin for the unexpected, and the unexpected coming anyway.

His first stop was Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Refuel, a brief rest, then across the North Atlantic - approximately 25 hours total to reach Berlin, Germany.

Berlin. More fuel. A few hours on a cot in a hangar. Back in the air before dawn.

Siberia: The Bent Propeller

The route from Berlin ran northeast toward Moscow, then east-northeast across the Ural Mountains and into the Siberian interior - genuinely one of the most remote stretches of terrain on earth. The landing strips Post had arranged along the route were, by any modern measure, not landing strips at all. They were cleared fields, sometimes marked with stakes, sometimes with nothing but a man standing at the far end waving a flag to show where the ground was.

Somewhere in the Soviet Union, the Winnie Mae nosed over on landing. Not a full flip - just enough to bring the propeller into contact with the ground and bend one blade.

Post was alone, roughly halfway around the world, with a damaged propeller, in a country where he did not speak the language.

Local workers came out with hand tools and improvised equipment. Together with Post, they bent the blade back as true as they could get it. He inspected it, decided it would hold long enough to reach the next stop, and took off.

It held.

The Pacific: Failed Autopilot, Two Thousand Miles by Hand

East of the Soviet coast, the autopilot failed completely. Not a partial failure to nurse along - a full stop. Post was forced to hand-fly the Winnie Mae across the north Pacific to Alaska: roughly 2,000 miles of open water cold enough to kill a man in minutes.

He flew it by hand. For hours. On whatever remained of the coffee he had been rationing since Germany and whatever it is that makes a person simply refuse to stop.

He made landfall over Alaska, put the Winnie Mae down at Fairbanks, refueled, slept briefly, and pressed on south. Fairbanks to Edmonton, Alberta. Edmonton to Cleveland. Cleveland to New York.

Landing: 11:59 AM, July 22, 1933

Post touched down at Floyd Bennett Field at 11:59 AM on July 22, 1933. Total elapsed time: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. He had beaten his own 1931 record by nearly a full day - alone, with one eye, a failed autopilot, and a propeller repaired by strangers in the Soviet interior.

The crowd that met him was smaller than the one that had welcomed him and Gatty two years before. A Depression-era summer meant the newspapers had harder things to cover. The pilots who understood what Post had done were not counting heads in the crowd.

The Pressure Suit and the Jet Stream

Post didn’t stop after the circumnavigation. He became convinced that the future of long-distance flight was extreme altitude - not 10,000 or 15,000 feet, but high enough to find the ferocious westerly winds he believed could cut days off transcontinental times. He was describing, with rough accuracy, what we now call the jet stream, which in the mid-1930s was not yet well understood or named as such.

The obstacle was survival. Above 20,000 feet, the atmosphere is too thin to breathe and cold enough to be lethal in minutes.

Post went to the B.F. Goodrich Company and asked them to build him a pressure suit. The first version failed. The second failed differently. The third, completed in 1934, worked well enough to actually fly in - rubberized fabric over a full-body frame, a pressurized helmet, gloves, and boots.

He flew a series of high-altitude flights from Burbank, California toward Cleveland, deliberately hunting the jet stream. On some of those runs, his ground speed exceeded 300 mph. He had found what he was looking for.

The pressure suit Post flew in is the direct ancestor of every high-altitude flight suit that followed - including those worn by U-2 pilots and early astronaut candidates. The understanding of the jet stream he helped establish shaped commercial air route planning for decades. He was flying a small wooden monoplane to the edge of the atmosphere in a hand-built pressure suit to prove a theory that the meteorologists of his era were still arguing about.

Death at Point Barrow: August 15, 1935

Wiley Post died on August 15, 1935. His passenger was Will Rogers - the humorist and radio broadcaster who was, at that moment, perhaps the most beloved American alive. They had been doing exploratory flying in Alaska. They took off from a lagoon near Point Barrow. The engine quit. The airplane went inverted into the water.

Both men were killed instantly.

The nation mourned Will Rogers openly and at length. Post received his tributes, but over the decades it is Rogers whose name has stayed in popular memory while Post has faded from general conversation.

Pilots remember him.

The Winnie Mae at the Smithsonian

The Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in the Milestones of Flight gallery. White paint, blue trim, the same Pratt and Whitney radial that carried her around the world twice. She hangs from the ceiling, which is exactly where she belongs.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post completed the first solo around-the-world flight in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, departing and landing at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn between July 15 and July 22, 1933
• Post flew the entire circumnavigation with one eye, having lost his left eye in a 1926 drilling accident and using the resulting $1,800 settlement to buy his first airplane
• Mid-flight equipment failures - a failed autopilot over the Pacific and a bent propeller repaired by Soviet workers - forced Post to complete critical legs of the flight by improvisation alone
• His subsequent pressure suit work with B.F. Goodrich produced the first practical high-altitude flight suit and contributed foundational knowledge of the jet stream, shaping both aviation suit design and transcontinental route planning for generations
• The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in the Milestones of Flight gallery