Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Circumnavigation That Found the Jet Stream

Wiley Post flew solo around the world in 1933 in a wooden monoplane called the Winnie Mae, completing the trip in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds. He used a gyroscopic autopilot he helped design and kept himself awake with a falling wrench. His follow-on high-altitude research, conducted in a pressure suit he built by trial and error, produced the first documented evidence of the jet stream - the river of wind that every airline dispatcher and cross-country pilot accounts for today.

From Oklahoma Oil Fields to the Cockpit

Post was born in Texas in 1898 and raised in Oklahoma, where the oil fields were the most likely career path for a man building his life with his hands. His first exposure to aviation came as a teenager when a barnstormer set down in a field near Lawton - an encounter that never left him.

In 1926, a drilling accident sent a metal fragment into Post’s left eye. He lost the eye entirely and received approximately $1,700 in workers’ compensation. He used that money to buy flying lessons. The injury that might have ended his dreams gave him the means to begin them.

He turned out to be a natural. Post moved from student to stunt pilot to charter work faster than most people earn a private certificate. He eventually became personal pilot for an Oklahoma oilman named F.C. Hall, who owned a Lockheed Vega.

What Made the Lockheed Vega Extraordinary

The Lockheed Vega was unlike anything else flying in the late 1920s. Designed by Jack Northrop at Lockheed, it used wooden monocoque construction - the skin of the fuselage was the structure. No external bracing, no drag-producing struts or wires, just a smooth shape that looked fast sitting still on the ramp.

With a Wright Whirlwind engine producing around 450 horsepower, the Vega could push close to 200 miles per hour in the right conditions. For 1929, that was breathtaking.

Hall named the aircraft after his daughter. Winnie Mae. Post maintained it like a pilot who understood the machine might save his life someday - because it was going to.

The 1931 World Circumnavigation with Harold Gatty

By 1931, Post had a plan to circle the globe. The Army Air Service had done it in 1924 with four Douglas World Cruisers (two finished the full route), but Post wanted to prove what a single modern monoplane could do at speed.

He brought in an Australian navigator named Harold Gatty, widely regarded as one of the sharpest celestial navigators alive. They departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island on June 23, 1931, flying northeast to Newfoundland, across the Atlantic to England, through Europe and Germany, across Russia and Siberia, through Alaska, and back across Canada to New York - roughly 15,000 miles in total.

The route was demanding in ways difficult to overstate. Siberian maps were generous approximations of the actual terrain. At one Soviet fuel stop, the Winnie Mae’s tail skid dug into soft ground on landing and required improvised repairs. At another, the welcoming committee was a crowd of villagers who had never seen an airplane.

They landed back in New York in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes - a new world record. The Depression-era city gave them ticker tape parades. America needed heroes badly, and Post and Gatty were genuine ones.

Post had already decided he wasn’t finished.

The 1933 Solo Circumnavigation: One Pilot, No Navigator, No Rescue

Two years later, Post announced he was going back - this time alone. No Gatty. No navigator of any kind. Just Post, the Winnie Mae, and a modified Sperry autopilot he had spent months learning alongside Sperry’s own engineers.

The Sperry system of that era was a pneumatically driven gyroscopic device that could hold heading and keep the wings roughly level if the aircraft was trimmed carefully. Post called it his “iron man.” He understood its quirks and limits precisely, because a system you don’t understand is not a tool - it’s a trap.

He departed Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on July 15, 1933.

How Post Survived Days Without Real Sleep

Post’s plan for managing fatigue was mechanical and brutal. Trim the aircraft, engage the iron man, set heading, and sleep in 15 to 20-minute intervals. The instrument that made this possible was a heavy wrench.

He held it loosely in his fist. As his grip relaxed toward sleep, the wrench dropped onto the cockpit floor and jolted him awake. Night after night over Siberia, the Pacific, and the Canadian north, that wrench earned its place in the cockpit.

He flew Berlin to Novosibirsk to Irkutsk to Yakutsk, taking fuel and sometimes food from ground crews who spoke no English - men who watched a small, one-eyed American land alone, refuel, and disappear back into the sky.

Over Alaska, fatigue hit hardest. Coming down through cloud toward the runway at Flat, Alaska, Post found himself over water instead. He turned, found the coastline, found the strip, and landed. His hands remembered what his exhausted mind could barely track.

He touched down at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933: 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds. The crowd that met him was larger than the one that had gathered for the first flight. The world had finally caught up with what he was actually doing.

The Pressure Suit: Building Equipment That Didn’t Exist

What Post did after the circumnavigations may ultimately matter more than either of the flights.

He believed that in the lower stratosphere, thinner air meant less drag, and an aircraft could cover more ground on the same fuel load. He was right. But above roughly 40,000 feet, the atmosphere is too thin to sustain human life without a pressurized environment. At those altitudes and temperatures, blood boils at body temperature. No pilot of that era had equipment designed for it.

Post approached the B.F. Goodrich company and began working with their engineers on a full pressure suit. The first version inflated like a balloon under pressure - he could barely grip the controls. The second improved on it but failed during ground tests. The third version worked. It looked like something between a deep-sea diving suit and science fiction, but it held pressure, and Post could fly in it.

He modified the Winnie Mae with a supercharged engine and flew a series of test flights up into the lower stratosphere over the American Southwest.

How Wiley Post Discovered the Jet Stream

The numbers from Post’s high-altitude flights didn’t add up. His groundspeed - calculated against elapsed time between known landmarks on the ground below - was dramatically higher than his airspeed indicator showed. Something up there was pushing him. Fast, organized, flowing consistently from west to east.

At certain altitudes and latitudes, Post measured wind speeds of 200 miles per hour and faster. He published his findings and lectured on what he’d observed. His instruments were crude and he was no scientist, but his data was real.

What Post documented over the desert Southwest in a modified Vega with a homemade pressure suit is what aviation meteorologists now call the jet stream. The same river of wind that every airline dispatcher calculates when filing eastbound flights at altitude. The phenomenon that shaves three hours off a New York-to-London crossing when you catch it right, and costs three hours if you’re fighting it going the other way.

Every time a pilot pulls up a winds-aloft forecast and decides what altitude to file, they are working from foundations Wiley Post laid in that inflated suit over the American Southwest.

The End at Point Barrow

Post died in August 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska. He and the writer and humorist Will Rogers were flying a patched-together floatplane that Post had assembled from mismatched components - a nose-heavy machine not suited to the off-airport work they were attempting. The engine quit shortly after Post lifted off from a lagoon near Barrow. The aircraft stalled. Both men were killed on impact.

Post was 36 years old.

The Winnie Mae is now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where the smooth wooden fuselage has been preserved through a thorough restoration. Stand next to it and consider how small it is, and what it flew through.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1933 in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds, departing and returning to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
His earlier 1931 flight with navigator Harold Gatty set a world record of 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes and established the Winnie Mae as one of the most capable aircraft of the era.
Post funded his entire flying career on $1,700 in workers’ compensation received after losing his left eye in a 1926 oil-field accident.
His post-circumnavigation high-altitude research - conducted in a pressure suit developed with B.F. Goodrich - produced the first documented evidence of the jet stream, the wind phenomenon every pilot accounts for when checking winds-aloft forecasts today.
The Winnie Mae is preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.