Wiley Post, the Winnie Mae, and the Solo Flight That Changed Everything We Know About the Upper Atmosphere

Wiley Post’s 1933 solo circumnavigation aboard the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae completed in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes - beating his own world record by nearly a full day. But the flight’s most consequential result wasn’t the record itself. At high altitude over Siberia, Post noticed his airplane was covering ground far faster than its airspeed indicated, documenting the first airborne evidence of what would later be named the jet stream.

From Oil Fields to Cockpit: Who Was Wiley Post?

Wiley Post was born in 1900 in Texas, a farm kid who grew up watching the skies. By his early twenties he had drifted into the Oklahoma oil fields, working as a roughneck on drilling crews.

In 1926, a workplace accident drove a metal fragment into his left eye. He lost it. The workers’ compensation settlement came to $1,800.

He used the money to buy an airplane.

Post taught himself to fly, adapting to single-eye vision the way a capable pilot adapts to any constraint - building new instincts, compensating, and refusing to quit. Instructors told him flatly that the depth perception loss would cap his potential as a pilot. He filed that opinion away and kept flying.

After barnstorming, he caught on as a personal pilot for F.C. Hall, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who valued speed and recognized exactly who could deliver it.

The Winnie Mae: More Than Just an Airplane

Hall purchased a Lockheed Vega - a high-wing monoplane with a wooden monocoque fuselage powered by a Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial engine. It was among the fastest production aircraft of its era: clean lines, minimal drag, and honest flight characteristics in the right hands. Hall named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter.

Post flew it like it had been built specifically for him. He won races. He set point-to-point records. And in 1931, he used it to rewrite the global standard for around-the-world flight.

The 1931 Record: Post and Gatty Circle the Globe

Post persuaded Hall to sponsor a circumnavigation attempt. He brought on Harold Gatty, an Australian navigator with an exceptional reputation, and the two men planned a route across the Atlantic, through Europe, across the Soviet Union and Siberia, through Alaska, and back to New York.

They departed Roosevelt Field in New York on June 23, 1931. The previous circumnavigation record stood at over 300 hours. Post and Gatty completed the flight in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes - roughly 209 hours.

New York responded with a ticker tape parade. They met President Hoover. They were the aviation heroes of the moment.

Post looked at the record they had just set and said he wanted to do it alone.

The Solo Challenge: Two Problems Without Solutions

Flying solo around the world in 1933 meant solving problems that had no existing answers.

The first was navigation. Without Gatty, Post couldn’t hand-navigate and fly simultaneously for thousands of miles over featureless terrain. He worked with the Sperry Gyroscope Company to develop a gyroscope-based heading-hold device - practical autopilot for a small aircraft. Roughly the size of a bread box, it could hold a course while Post took his hands off the controls. For 1933, this was genuinely revolutionary.

The second problem was fatigue. Post’s solution was brutally simple: he would hold a metal ball bearing loosely in his palm while resting his eyes. When real sleep took him, the ball would drop, strike the cockpit floor, and wake him.

July 1933: The Solo Flight

On July 15, 1933, Post taxied the Winnie Mae to the runway at Floyd Bennett Field in New York. He was alone, the airplane heavy with fuel, the morning overcast.

The route followed roughly the same arc as the 1931 flight with Gatty: across the North Atlantic, through England and Germany, into the Soviet Union, then the long grinding legs across Siberia toward Alaska.

The Soviet leg was the hardest. Low ceilings, dense fog, and sheeting rain over terrain that offered no landmarks even in clear weather. Post flew on instruments and dead reckoning, trusting the gyro and his sense of time and heading. He made emergency landings on improvised strips in remote Russia, borrowed fuel from airstrips that barely deserved the name, and had the Winnie Mae dug out of mud by locals who didn’t speak his language - communicating through hand signals and the universal urgency of a pilot who needs to get back in the air.

He arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska, ahead of the pace he and Gatty had set two years earlier.

Post landed back at Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933. Final time: 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. He had broken his own record by nearly a full day - alone.

The Accidental Discovery: Wiley Post and the Jet Stream

The record was the headline. The discovery was the story.

At altitude over Siberia and the Soviet Far East - climbing to 12,000, 15,000 feet and higher - Post consistently noticed his groundspeed exceeded what the airspeed indicator showed. The Winnie Mae was covering ground faster than any tailwind the meteorological understanding of 1933 could explain.

The standard atmospheric model of the era held that high-altitude winds were weaker and less organized than surface winds - that the upper atmosphere was calm relative to what you encountered down low.

Post’s experience contradicted this entirely. What he was encountering - without a name for it - was the jet stream: powerful, narrow bands of westerly winds in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, capable of exceeding 100 knots at the core. These are the winds commercial aviation uses daily to reduce eastbound crossing times, the winds every dispatcher accounts for in route planning, the winds behind that 40-minute swing in your cross-country flight time from one week to the next.

He was not the first to notice anomalous high-altitude winds. Wasaburo Oishi, a Japanese meteorologist, had been tracking upper-level westerlies over Japan since the 1920s using weather balloons. But Oishi published much of his work in Esperanto, and his findings never reached the English-speaking aviation community in a form that stuck. Post’s observations - gathered from inside a moving aircraft across thousands of miles - translated abstract balloon data into something the aviation world could actually hold onto.

The Pressure Suit: Solving the Altitude Problem

Post returned to Lockheed and said he wanted to go even higher. He believed that a properly equipped aircraft at 30,000 feet or above, inside those winds, could fundamentally change what long-distance aviation was capable of. He was right.

But getting a human being to 30,000 feet in 1934 meant solving a problem nobody had cracked in practical terms. At that altitude the atmosphere is too thin for unassisted breathing. Blood oxygen drops, cognition degrades, and loss of consciousness follows. Commercial cabin pressurization did not yet exist, and the Winnie Mae was unpressurized.

Post worked with B.F. Goodrich and aviation medicine researchers to develop a full-body pressure suit. The engineering was brutally difficult. The first version inflated so rigidly that Post couldn’t bend his arms or legs. The second improved on this but had fundamental problems with the helmet seal. The third - the version he actually flew in - looked like something from a science fiction serial: a bulbous helmet with a small porthole window, a rubber inner bladder maintaining pressure against the body, outer fabric for structure, and pressurized gloves. The entire ensemble weighed around 25 pounds and required a team to get him inside it. Post’s wife Mae and a crew of Goodrich engineers worked together to seal him in before each flight.

It worked well enough to fly.

Post made multiple high-altitude flights over the continental United States in 1934 and 1935, reaching above 30,000 feet. He was empirically documenting jet stream behavior - proving that these winds were real, consistent, geographically predictable, and exploitable.

Why This Matters for Pilots and Aviation

Post’s research fed directly into programs that became the foundation of stratospheric aviation. Military meteorologists studied upper-level winds intensively during World War II, factoring them into high-altitude bombing missions over Europe and Japan. After the war, commercial aviation adopted jet stream routing deliberately and systematically. Today it is a fundamental planning tool for every airline in operation.

The pressure suit Post developed is the direct conceptual ancestor of the suits worn by U-2 reconnaissance pilots during the Cold War, by SR-71 Blackbird crews, and by every astronaut who has ever ridden a rocket into space.

Wiley Post died on August 15, 1935, when a hybrid aircraft he had assembled for an Alaska exploration flight lost power on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow. He and Will Rogers - the humorist and one of the most beloved Americans of the era - were killed immediately. Post was 45 years old.

The original Winnie Mae is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It is smaller than most people expect. The wooden fuselage, the cramped cockpit, the instrument panel that seems impossibly sparse - all of it a reminder that one man sat in that space alone above Siberia, holding a metal ball bearing in his palm, chasing winds nobody else had mapped.

Key Takeaways

Wiley Post completed the first solo circumnavigation in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes in July 1933, beating the record he had set with Harold Gatty in 1931 by nearly a full day.
Working with the Sperry Gyroscope Company, Post developed practical autopilot for light aircraft specifically to make the solo flight possible - technology that was genuinely novel for its era.
At altitude over Siberia, Post documented what would later be identified as the jet stream, translating Wasaburo Oishi’s earlier balloon observations into firsthand airborne evidence the aviation world could use.
Three design iterations with B.F. Goodrich produced a functional full-body pressure suit that is the direct ancestor of U-2, SR-71, and astronaut pressure suits.
Post’s high-altitude research established that jet stream routing was real and exploitable - foundational to every transatlantic and transpacific commercial flight operating today.