Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Circumnavigation That Proved One Man Could Circle the Globe Alone

On July 15, 1933, a one-eyed former oilfield worker climbed alone into a single-engine Lockheed Vega at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and flew around the world by himself. Wiley Post completed that solo circumnavigation in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - beating his own previously set record by nearly a full day. His story reaches well beyond the record: the technologies he pioneered helped define modern aviation and, ultimately, the space age.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in 1898 in Corinth, Texas, and grew up poor in Oklahoma Territory. He was an oilfield roughneck, not a man who came to aviation through family wealth or a military commission. He saw his first airplane at a county fair around age fifteen and could not explain what it did to him - only that from that moment, everything else felt like a detour.

The detours lasted years. Then, in October 1926, a steel drill chip struck him in the right eye. He lost the eye entirely. His workers’ compensation settlement was $1,800.

How a One-Eyed Pilot Rebuilt Depth Perception

Most men would have used that money to rebuild a modest life. Post used it to buy flying time. He found a barnstormer willing to teach him, worked a parachuting act to pay for more lessons, and eventually scraped together enough to buy a used biplane trainer.

Flying with monocular vision strips away the natural stereoscopic depth perception pilots rely on - particularly on final approach. The subtle picture your brain builds of distance and rate of closure simply disappears. Post rebuilt that sense from scratch. He learned to read runway apparent size, shadow angles, and the rate the ground came up. People who flew with him described the spatial intuition he developed as at least as reliable as any two-eyed pilot’s - more so, because he had built it deliberately rather than taking it for granted.

That skill caught the attention of Florence Chester Hall - F.C. Hall - a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who owned a factory-fresh Lockheed Vega painted white with dark trim. He named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter, and he hired Post to fly it.

What Made the Lockheed Vega Special

The Vega, designed by Jack Northrop in the late 1920s, was a genuine leap forward. Its fuselage was a single molded plywood shell - aerodynamically clean in a way few aircraft of the era matched. A cantilever wing meant no external bracing dragging through the air. With a Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine up front, it cruised at 140 to 150 mph, which was fast for a civilian aircraft in 1930. Amelia Earhart flew one solo across the Atlantic in 1932. For pilots who needed range and speed, the Vega was the machine.

Post flew the Winnie Mae for Hall and made them both famous, winning the 1930 National Air Race transcontinental derby from Los Angeles to Chicago and setting a new course record.

Post and Gatty: The First Circumnavigation

Post had a bigger idea. In 1929, the German airship Graf Zeppelin had circumnavigated the globe in 21 days and 5 hours. Post wanted to beat that in an airplane.

He partnered with Harold Gatty, an Australian widely regarded as one of the finest navigators alive. Their planned route ran from New York to Newfoundland to England to Germany to Moscow to Siberia to Alaska and back - essentially over the top of the world, following the shortest great-circle path.

On June 23, 1931, Post and Gatty lifted off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes later, they landed back at Roosevelt Field to a crowd of 50,000 people. They had covered approximately 15,000 miles and shattered the circumnavigation record. Will Rogers, then one of the biggest personalities in America, called it the greatest feat in aviation history. A ticker-tape parade followed up Broadway.

Why Post Flew Again - Alone

For most people, the 1931 circumnavigation would have been a legacy. Post was already planning to go again, this time without a navigator.

The problem was fundamental. Gatty had handled navigation on the first flight while Post flew. Solo, Post would have to do both simultaneously. More critically, the flight would take the better part of eight to nine days. A man cannot fly nine days without sleep. A man sleeping cannot fly.

Post turned to technology.

The Autopilot and the Wheeled Dolly

The Sperry Corporation had been developing gyroscopic autopilots for years. Post acquired a production Sperry unit, had it installed in the Winnie Mae, and spent months learning its behavior - where it was reliable, where it needed attention. He could engage the autopilot, take a deliberate 20 to 30-minute nap, and trust the airplane to hold heading and altitude. The combination of pilot and machine was different from anything attempted before.

He also modified the airframe substantially. An additional fuel tank placed forward of the cockpit loaded the nose so heavily the airplane could barely rotate on takeoff. His solution was a wheeled dolly system for the main landing gear: the dolly would fall away after liftoff, letting the Winnie Mae carry the fuel load without the permanent weight penalty of a reinforced undercarriage. She would land on lighter gear because that gear only had to survive a light landing, not a heavy takeoff. It was the kind of improvised engineering that defined aviation in the 1930s.

The Solo Circumnavigation: July 1933

With approximately 1,500 pounds of fuel aboard, Post taxied to the runway at Floyd Bennett Field on July 15, 1933 and pushed the throttle forward. The Winnie Mae used nearly the entire runway before she lifted off, slow and heavy, into the morning sky.

The flight was not clean.

Fog over the English coast forced him to feel his way to the surface on instruments. He landed at the wrong British airfield entirely, costing time and adding embarrassment to exhaustion. In Germany he overslept a brief rest stop and had to scramble local mechanics to help him refuel and get moving. The Soviet leg through Siberia pushed him through weather he later admitted he would never have launched into had he seen the full picture in advance.

Siberia nearly ended everything. The Winnie Mae hit a muddy airstrip at the village of Flat hard enough that the propeller blades bent on impact. Post climbed out and assumed the flight was over. A local machinist - working with hand tools and nothing more - removed the propeller, reshaped the blades toward balance, and reinstalled it. Post ran the engine up. Rough, but running. He went.

He crossed the Bering Sea with barely enough fuel to reach the Alaskan coast. There is a version of this story where the engine quits over open water and Wiley Post disappears. That version came uncomfortably close to being the real one.

He made Alaska. He pushed south through Canada. On the afternoon of July 22, 1933, the Winnie Mae settled onto the pavement at Floyd Bennett Field.

Solo. Alone. Around the entire earth. In 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes.

The crowd was smaller than after the first flight. The world had already half-absorbed the idea that a man could fly around it in an airplane, and the second time something impossible gets done, the astonishment is diminished - even when the achievement is greater.

Why This Matters for Every Pilot Flying Today

After the solo circumnavigation, Post became obsessed with high-altitude flight. He had a theory: at very high altitudes, above where conventional aircraft operated, there had to be winds of extraordinary speed and consistency - winds that could push an eastbound airplane across continents in a fraction of normal transit time.

He was right. We call them the jet stream today.

To reach those altitudes, Post needed a pressure suit. At 50,000 feet, the atmosphere is too thin to sustain human life without pressurization, and nothing practical existed. Post designed one himself in collaboration with engineers at B.F. Goodrich and Army Air Corps specialists. He went through three prototypes: the first would not seal properly, the second pressurized but became so rigid the pilot could barely move the controls, and the third worked well enough to fly.

He made a series of high-altitude flights in the modified Winnie Mae, climbing above 50,000 feet, and documented wind speeds at altitude that the meteorological community had not yet formally characterized. That work contributed directly to the scientific understanding of stratospheric wind patterns. Every airline dispatcher who routes a flight to ride the jet stream - saving thousands of dollars in fuel - is drawing, in part, on knowledge Post helped establish.

The pressure suit he helped develop was a direct ancestor of the suits Mercury astronauts would wear a generation later. Post in 1934 was doing work that anticipated the space age by thirty years.

The Death of Wiley Post

On August 15, 1935, Post died in Alaska. He was 36 years old.

He was on an exploration flight with Will Rogers, flying a hybrid floatplane Post had assembled from parts of two different Lockheed designs and fitted with pontoons. The combination created a nose-heavy aircraft, particularly on climbout.

They lifted off from a lagoon south of Point Barrow. The engine lost power almost immediately after takeoff. The floatplane rolled inverted and struck the water. Both men were killed instantly.

Will Rogers’s death dominated the newspapers for weeks, as it should have - Rogers was among the most beloved Americans of his generation. But aviation lost something in that lagoon that it is still reckoning with, even when it doesn’t name what’s missing.

Where to See the Winnie Mae

The Winnie Mae is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, in the Milestones of Flight gallery - alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer.

She looks small in person. That surprises nearly everyone who sees her. Small, given that she crossed every ocean, flew over the roof of Siberia, and proved that one man with one eye could take a machine and circle the entire earth alone.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation of the globe on July 22, 1933, in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, departing and returning to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
• Post lost his right eye in an industrial accident in 1926 and rebuilt his depth perception from scratch - a skill that enabled everything that followed.
• He used a Sperry gyroscopic autopilot to manage sleep during the solo flight, pioneering the human-machine partnership that defines modern instrument flying.
• His high-altitude research produced the first documented evidence of what we now call the jet stream, a discovery that shapes every transatlantic and transcontinental flight plan filed today.
• The pressure suit Post developed with B.F. Goodrich was a direct precursor to the suits worn by Mercury astronauts; his 1934 high-altitude work anticipated the space age by three decades.