Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Flight Around the World That Nobody Thought One Man Could Fly

On July 22, 1933, Wiley Post landed at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, completing the first solo flight around the world in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - nearly a full day faster than the record he himself had set two years earlier with a navigator. He flew with one eye, in a plywood monoplane barely larger than a pickup truck, over roughly 15,000 miles of ocean, Soviet steppe, and Arctic terrain. In doing so, he also pioneered practical civilian autopilot use, pressure-suit aviation, and laid the observational groundwork for the discovery of the jet stream.

From Oil Fields to the Cockpit

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in 1898 in Corinth, Texas. He grew up poor, left school early, and worked the Oklahoma oil fields as a roughneck. In 1926, a metal chip struck him in the left eye while he was working a well near Seminole, Oklahoma. The injury cost him the eye entirely. The oil company paid him $1,800 in settlement.

Post used that money to buy a surplus Curtiss Jenny biplane. He taught himself to fly it and began working county fairs and fly-ins across the Southwest, charging a dollar a ride. He wore a black monocle over the empty socket - not an affectation, but a practical cover. By 1927, his skill had earned him a job as personal pilot to an Oklahoma oilman named F.C. Hall.

The Winnie Mae: Post’s Record-Breaking Aircraft

Hall’s aircraft was a Lockheed Vega - one of the finest civilian airplanes of its era. It had a molded plywood fuselage, a Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine, and a top speed exceeding 200 mph. Hall named the airplane the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

In 1930, Post entered the Winnie Mae in the National Air Race Derby from Los Angeles to Chicago. He won convincingly, setting a new transcontinental speed record. That win gave him a name - and an idea.

The 1931 Around-the-World Flight with Harold Gatty

Post recruited Harold Gatty, an Australian aerial navigator with a reputation as one of the finest alive. Where Post was instinct and nerve, Gatty was calculation and precision. Hall sponsored the attempt and loaned them the Winnie Mae, fitted with additional fuel tanks.

Their route ran east from New York through Newfoundland, across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the Soviet Union, through Alaska, and back across North America - roughly 15,000 miles.

On June 23, 1931, Post and Gatty departed Floyd Bennett Field, New York. Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes later, they were back. The record drew 100,000 people to the field, a ticker-tape parade, and a meeting with President Hoover. Gatty returned to Australia a celebrity. Post began thinking about how to do it faster - alone.

Preparing for the Solo: Autopilot and a Pressure Suit

The two-year preparation that followed addressed two distinct problems: navigation without Gatty, and the limits of the human body at high altitude.

For navigation, Post worked with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to install one of the first practical civilian autopilot systems in the Winnie Mae. It couldn’t manage the aircraft fully, but it would hold heading and altitude - enough to allow 20-minute rest intervals, chart review, or a meal. On a flight lasting more than a week, those stolen minutes were survival arithmetic.

Post also had a theory about the upper atmosphere. Meteorologists were beginning to suggest that winds above 20,000 to 25,000 feet could produce ground speeds no propeller-driven aircraft could match under its own power at lower altitudes. The problem was oxygen and cold: at that altitude, hypoxia incapacitates a pilot before he recognizes it, and outside temperatures are lethal.

Post contracted B.F. Goodrich to develop a full pressure suit - a sealed, oxygen-supplied garment covering the entire body. Three versions were built and tested before Post could move in one. He tested it in a pressure chamber and at altitude in the Winnie Mae. During one high-altitude test, he blew a tire on landing and ground-looped the aircraft badly enough to require significant repairs. He fixed it and kept testing.

The Solo Around-the-World Flight: July 1933

On July 15, 1933, at 5:30 AM, Post climbed into the Winnie Mae at Floyd Bennett Field - alone - and pointed the nose east.

The opening leg to Berlin went reasonably well, though Atlantic headwinds cost him time he hadn’t planned to lose. He landed at Tempelhof Airport, grabbed fuel, slept briefly on a hangar cot, and pressed on. The Soviet legs - Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk - were long and punishing, with vast stretches offering no reliable landmarks. The radio direction finder worked intermittently. For extended stretches, Post held heading by compass and dead reckoning alone.

He was grounded near Flat, Alaska - a gold mining settlement - when fog closed the route ahead. He sat for the better part of a day watching the clock and the sky move in opposite directions. The fog lifted. He pushed on.

The Sperry autopilot held the Winnie Mae straight and level through the crossing of the lower 48. Post rested his head against the side window and took whatever sleep the engine noise allowed.

On July 22, 1933, at 11:26 AM, Wiley Post touched down at Floyd Bennett Field. When he climbed out of the cockpit, his legs had stiffened so badly from days of near-immobility that he nearly went down on the tarmac. Someone steadied him. The crowd came.

How Wiley Post Helped Discover the Jet Stream

Post continued his high-altitude research after both flights, pushing the Winnie Mae into the stratosphere in the pressure suit. The ground speeds he was recording at altitude made no sense against what his engine should have been producing.

There was a river of wind up there that no one had charted. Post was riding what we now call the jet stream - measuring its effects in a rubber pressure suit inside a plywood Lockheed Vega - nearly a decade before meteorologists and military researchers formally documented it following World War II. For pilots today who file routes based on jet stream forecasts, the observational foundation of that knowledge runs back to Post’s stratospheric experiments in the early 1930s.

The Fatal Flight with Will Rogers

By 1935, Post was exploring Alaskan bush flying routes. He partnered with humorist Will Rogers on an exploratory flight north. The aircraft was a hybrid - a Lockheed Orion fuselage mounted on floats that added considerable weight forward. Several experienced Alaskan pilots who examined the combination raised concerns about whether the engine was adequate for the nose-heavy configuration.

Post and Rogers flew north anyway.

On August 15, 1935, they took off from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska. The engine quit shortly after liftoff. The aircraft went straight down.

Will Rogers was 55. Wiley Post was 36.

Rogers was mourned as one of the most beloved entertainers in America - front pages, congressional tributes, radio eulogies. Post received quieter recognition, but the aviation community understood the scale of the loss: a man who had converted two near-career-ending setbacks - his eye, a wrecked airplane - into achievements no one else had attempted.

Where Is the Winnie Mae Today?

The Winnie Mae was donated to the Smithsonian Institution and hangs today in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside the pressure suit Post wore on his stratospheric flights. She is smaller than most visitors expect - a round-bellied monoplane built from wood, fabric, and a kind of stubbornness that doesn’t have a tidy name.

Key Takeaways

• Wiley Post completed the first solo around-the-world flight on July 22, 1933, covering roughly 15,000 miles in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - with one eye.
• He beat his own 1931 record (set with navigator Harold Gatty in 8 days, 15 hours, 51 minutes) by nearly a full day, flying alone.
• His work with the Sperry Gyroscope Company was among the first civilian applications of autopilot technology for long-distance endurance flight.
• Post effectively discovered the jet stream through early-1930s high-altitude pressure-suit flights, years before it was formally documented by science.
• He died August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, in a crash that also killed Will Rogers, at age 36.
• The Winnie Mae and Post’s original pressure suit are preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.