Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Flight Around the World That One Eye Never Should Have Made

Wiley Post flew the first solo circumnavigation of the Earth in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - with one eye, no co-pilot, and a piece of elastic cord rigged to wake him if he fell asleep over Siberia. His 1933 record, flown in the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae, stands as one of the defining achievements in aviation history. It wasn’t the end of his ambitions. It was barely the midpoint.

Who Was Wiley Post?

Post was born in 1898 in Texas, but his family settled in Oklahoma Territory when he was young. He saw his first airplane at a county fair - the standard origin story for a generation of great early pilots - and never stopped thinking about it.

He barnstormed. He parachute-jumped for five dollars a Saturday. He worked his way from onlooker to copilot to pilot, eventually landing a job flying for an Oklahoma oil man named Florence Chester Hall, who owned a Lockheed Vega he’d named the Winnie Mae, after his daughter.

The Accident That Changed Everything

In 1926, a bolt flew loose from an oil drilling rig and struck Post in his left eye. The eye was gone. He received a workers’ compensation settlement from the oil company.

He used the money to buy an airplane.

Post trained himself to judge altitude and distance through alternative cues - airspeed, the horizon, the relationship between the ground and his wingtip. He convinced the relevant medical authorities, got back in the cockpit, and in 1930 won the National Air Race from Los Angeles to Chicago. In that era, winning that race was roughly the equivalent of winning the Indianapolis 500. The aviation world took notice.

The Winnie Mae

The Lockheed Vega was the thoroughbred of its day. All-wood construction, a monocoque fuselage formed by wrapping wood veneers over a concrete mold, high-wing layout, and an enclosed cockpit that was considered luxurious by 1930s standards. Fast, stable, and purposeful-looking. Post flew it like it was an extension of his body.

The 1931 Around-the-World Flight with Harold Gatty

Post set his sights on circumnavigation - not the leisurely kind. The U.S. Army Air Service had circled the globe in 1924, but it took 175 days, four aircraft, and an elaborate support operation. Post wanted days, not months.

He found a navigator named Harold Gatty, an Australian who could read celestial navigation the way most people read a newspaper. Together they planned an eastbound route: New York, across the Atlantic, through England, Germany, the Soviet Union, across Siberia, through Alaska, and home.

On June 23, 1931, Post and Gatty lifted off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island - the same field where Lindbergh had departed for Paris four years earlier. They crossed the Atlantic, cleared London, Berlin, and Moscow, pushed through a Soviet Union that was not especially welcoming to American visitors but had agreed to allow transit, and landed back in New York.

Eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. A new world record for aerial circumnavigation. President Hoover received them at the White House.

The 1933 Solo Circumnavigation

Post wanted to do it again. Alone.

Flying solo around the world is categorically different from flying with a navigator. There is no one to read charts while you fly, no one to monitor fuel while you rest, no one to wake you when fatigue takes over. Post planned for all of it.

He worked with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to install an automatic pilot in the Winnie Mae - a mechanical, pneumatically driven gyroscope that could hold the aircraft’s attitude and heading while Post rested his hands. Temperamental, but functional. He added a radio direction finder, pre-positioned fuel and support crews at key stops, and studied the Soviet airfields, which ranged from adequate to alarming.

For the problem of staying awake over Siberia, he devised a simple solution: an elastic cord with one end looped around his finger and the other end attached to the control yoke. If his grip relaxed in sleep, the cord pulled taut against his finger and woke him.

On July 15, 1933, Post pushed the throttle forward at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Grey morning. The Winnie Mae climbed east.

He made England, then Berlin, then pushed across Germany to what is now Kaliningrad and on to Moscow. The Soviets had fuel waiting. The worst of it was Siberia - not just the weather and the marginal airstrips, but the sheer indifferent distance. Thousands of miles of empty terrain with no reliable radio beacons, no meaningful rescue infrastructure, and nothing between him and the tundra but the drone of the Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine and the mechanical gyropilot.

He refueled at Novosibirsk. At Khabarovsk. He crossed into Alaska, stopped briefly at Fairbanks where a crowd had gathered to watch him land, and pushed south through fog over Canada. He followed airways that barely qualified as airways by modern standards, navigating by radio direction finder and feel.

On July 22, 1933, Wiley Post landed back at Floyd Bennett Field.

Seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. Approximately 15,600 miles. Alone.

He had cut nearly a full day off the record he had set with Gatty just two years earlier. It was the first solo aerial circumnavigation in history and the fastest circumnavigation by air. Congratulations arrived by wire from President Roosevelt. Front pages everywhere.

Post Discovers the Jet Stream

On his high-altitude runs across the northern routes, Post noticed something the meteorologists of the era were only beginning to understand: at extreme altitude, in the stratosphere, there were winds moving faster than anything available lower down. Steady, powerful, directional. If an airplane could reach those winds and fly east, it could cover ground at speeds simply unavailable in the lower atmosphere.

We now call those winds the jet stream. In the early 1930s, they barely had a name.

Post understood that the future of long-range aviation was up there, above the weather and the headwinds that ground pilots down at lower altitudes. He was right. It would take jet engines and pressurized airliners to prove it commercially, but Post grasped the fundamental insight first.

The First Practical Pressure Suit in Aviation History

The problem was breathable air. At the altitudes where those winds existed, the cockpit of a Lockheed Vega offered no protection. So Post built a suit.

Working with the B.F. Goodrich Company, he designed and built what became the first practical pressure suit in aviation history. It took three attempts. The first version was too rigid - the joints wouldn’t flex enough to work the controls. The second version leaked at altitude. The third version, completed in 1934, worked.

It looked extraordinary: rubberized canvas, a bubble helmet, valves and fittings covering the exterior. Post wore it in high-altitude and stratospheric speed runs over the American Midwest, testing the Winnie Mae at altitudes no unpressurized pilot had ever approached, mapping the behavior of the upper-level winds.

Some of the speed claims from those flights were disputed due to unreliable instrumentation. But the suit worked. And that rubberized contraption is the direct ancestor of every pressure suit that followed - the suits worn by U-2 pilots, the suits worn by Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts. When Alan Shepard suited up for his capsule flight in 1961, the lineage of that suit ran directly back to Wiley Post.

The Crash That Killed Wiley Post and Will Rogers

In August 1935, Post and his friend Will Rogers - one of the most beloved humorists and radio personalities in America - flew north on a pleasure trip to Alaska. They flew a specially fitted floatplane assembled from parts that were poorly matched in terms of weight and balance. The nose-heavy configuration was a known concern.

On August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, the engine quit shortly after takeoff from a lagoon. The nose dropped. The altitude was too low to recover.

Will Rogers died instantly. Wiley Post died within seconds. He was 36 years old.

The news traveled south by telegraph from the edge of the Arctic. Two men who had seemed, in their different ways, indestructible - gone in an afternoon at the top of the world.

Where the Winnie Mae Is Today

The Winnie Mae survived both of them. She hangs today in the Milestones of Flight gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside the Spirit of St. Louis and the Bell X-1.

She is smaller than most visitors expect. The fuselage is smooth and purposeful. The whole airplane carries the look of something built to go fast - and it did exactly that.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post flew the first solo aerial circumnavigation of the Earth in 1933, completing the flight in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes across approximately 15,600 miles - with vision in only one eye.
Post had previously set a world record for circumnavigation in 1931 with navigator Harold Gatty: 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes departing from Roosevelt Field, Long Island.
His solo flight relied on a Sperry mechanical autopilot, a radio direction finder, and a homemade finger-cord alarm system to prevent him from sleeping into disaster over Siberia.
Post identified and documented the jet stream before the phenomenon had a formal name, correctly predicting that high-altitude winds would define the future of long-range aviation.
Working with B.F. Goodrich, Post built the first practical pressure suit in aviation history in 1934 - the direct ancestor of suits worn by U-2 pilots and NASA astronauts.
Post and Will Rogers died together on August 15, 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, when their floatplane’s engine failed at low altitude after takeoff.