Wiley Post completed the world’s first solo, around-the-world flight more than 90 years ago. In the plywood contraption known as the Winnie Mae, he landed in New York City one summer night in 1933 after circling the globe in seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, and making only 11 stops.
Immersed in the confetti, ticker tape, and newsreel excitement was a bashful man with a disarming smile and vanguard sense of urgency, ever aware that the slightest delay meant the difference between success and failure.
Indeed, Wiley Post was a visionary who saw new worlds to conquer in the heavens. The inventor of the first pressurized aviation suit—the forerunner of the modern space or astronaut suit— Post conceived things out of his own need. His discoveries paved the way for visits to the moon and other scientific discoveries.
However, he was an unlikely candidate for such astounding accomplishments or illustrious regard. A one-eyed oil driller who dropped out of school in the sixth grade, he was of hardscrabble stock from the most meager agricultural origins in Texas and Oklahoma.
Farm Boy Fixated on the Sky
Wiley Hardeman Post was born Nov. 22, 1898, on a remote farm near Grand Saline, Texas. This was Van Zandt County, named after Isaac Van Zandt. Isaac’s third great-grandson would be singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt.Post and his sharecropper family moved to southwestern Oklahoma, around Maysville, around the time of statehood. He was a farm boy who disliked farm life. Plowing, digging, thrashing, making hay, and binding grain—none of these chores appealed to him. He was interested in tinkering with the things that allowed the farm to operate, like mechanical gadgets or machinery.
Stories about nascent air travel were said to elevate his eyebrows: tales of odd machines lifting into a blue vault of sky, like the Wright brothers’ sustained 1903 flight, or funny contraptions supernaturally carried off in the clouds. He preferred to whittle model airplanes with a pocketknife rather than memorize the alphabet or math charts; he didn’t like school and dropped out early.
Many stories said that Post left home at about age 11 and found work as a mechanic and repairman and drilling crew floorhand in the Oklahoma oilfields. In 1913, Post reportedly saw his first airplane in flight at the county fair in Lawton, Oklahoma. He also learned “radio technology” during World War I, but the war ended before he finished training.
A New Opportunity
In 1924, Post, still employed in the oilfields, signed on with the Burell Tibbs Flying Circus as a parachute jumper and barnstormer. There, he picked up his first hours of pilot instruction. Zipping through the sky sprinkled with clouds, Post gazed awestruck at the vast expanses of land below. The self-determination and independence that flight required must have been exhilarating. There was, he understood at once, a grandeur to this endeavor.In October 1926, he took a job in Seminole, Oklahoma, where a sliver of steel from a co-worker’s sledge hammer pierced his left eye. Efforts to save the badly infected eye were ineffective. But the tragedy was instrumental in helping him begin his journey toward aviation: Post was awarded approximately $1,800 as compensation. Out of this money he bought his first airplane, a Curtiss JN-4 Canuck.
Subsequently, he landed a job for Chickasha, Oklahoma oilman F. C. Hall of the Phillips Petroleum Company. Hall sent Wily to California to buy a new Lockheed Vega airplane, then named it after his daughter Winnie Mae Hall.
By 1930, Post was bored with barnstorming and cross-country flying, and he set his sights on long distance and experimental flights. He wanted to fly around the world. Post convinced Hall to back him in his attempt.
In 1931, Post and Australian navigator Harold Gatty traveled around the world with the Winnie Mae in eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes. On June 23, 1931, the Winnie Mae lifted off from Roosevelt Field airport in Westbury, New York and stopped in Newfoundland and Labrador, England, Germany, Russia, Alaska and Canada. It stopped in New York City on July 1, 1931. Having successfully annihilated the boundaries of space and time, both pilots became instant heroes.
A Solo Flight
Before long, Post developed a plan to fly around the earth solo in the Winnie Mae. He purchased the plane from Hall and left Floyd Bennett Field, New York at 5:10 a.m. on July 15, 1933, and arrived in Berlin in just under 26 hours.This flight was one of the first times that autopilot was used in an airplane. It was a new technology that allowed a pilot to be more accurate in flight and reduced the possibility of pilot error. At one point, Post experienced problems with the Sperry Gyroscope Company autopilot, but he didn’t let it prevent him from pushing ahead. He experienced inclement weather, and the flagrant sense of danger that seemed to swirl in the air. But he didn’t let that deter him.
He negotiated his way across Siberia, the Bering Strait, and Alaska, where he was lost for seven hours. While he couldn’t find Nome, Alaska, he spotted the village of Flat, and landed, but the plane tipped on to the soft sand, breaking a few parts and bending the propeller. A substitute propeller was flown in from Fairbanks, repairs were completed, and a staggeringly exhausted Post was on his way. To prevent himself from falling asleep, he tied a wrench to one finger; if he dozed off, the wrench would drop to the floor, shaking him awake.
Despite several setbacks, his whirlwind speed brought him to the end of his 15,596-mile trip in seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. When he landed at Floyd Bennett Field, he'd shortened the distance around the world to little over a week, bettering the record he and Gatty had set by more than 21 hours.
Post pulled himself through the hatch on the top of the plane, knowing he was the toast of the planet. Approximately 50,000 cheering people had jammed the field to catch glimpse of this modern marvel—the exacting aviator with the patch covering his sightless eye and the machine that transcended human possibility.
In the midst of the Great Depression, America had a new hero to cling to. New York City turned out en masse to shout approval, showering tons of confetti and miles of ticker tape through his triumphal procession through mazes of iron and steel skyscrapers.
In total, Post set three records on his dash around the world: the fastest trip around the world; the first solo flight around the world; and the fastest flight from New York to Berlin, 3,900 miles, in 25 hours and 45 minutes.
Still, Post was determined to go faster and farther at higher altitudes. But he encountered a problem at upper elevations: the aircraft cabin couldn’t be pressurized. Post pressurized himself instead, working with the B. F. Goodrich Company in 1934 to develop the world’s first practical flight pressure suit.
In attempt at a cross-country flight, Post and his oxygenated outfit of rubberized parachute fabric flew from Burbank, California, to Cleveland, Ohio, a distance of 2,035 miles, on March 15, 1935. He attained a maximum speed of 340 miles per hour, in 7 hours, 19 minutes.
Death of Two Giants
After the Winnie Mae was retired, Wiley Post turned to a sleek, experimental Lockheed hybrid for his next adventure. He looked for additional mail routes across Siberia and picked his friend, the world-famous humorist Will Rogers, to join him. The two men had met about 10 years earlier, when Post piloted the beloved entertainer to a rodeo event.Post and Rogers took their time in Alaska for several days—hunting, fishing, and sightseeing. But on Aug. 15, 1935, the rain and dense fog and engine trouble made it extremely difficult for Post to navigate from Fairbanks to Barrow. Post noticed smoke curling from an Eskimo fishing village and landed in a shallow river. After dinner, motor repairs, and receiving navigation instructions for Barrow, Post took off. But the engine failed immediately and the airplane crashed into the river, killing both men.
Oklahoma lost two of its most famous citizens, and America lost two of its grandest personalities. Post was age 36. Rogers was age 55. Eight thousand people met the plane carrying Post’s body at the Oklahoma City airport. His funeral was one of the largest in Oklahoma state history.
As a boy, Wiley Post longed to be a part of the wider world—and planes became his means of escape. In the process, he broadened the frontiers of aviation. Every advance in aeronautics and air travel carries with it a little piece and remembrance of his dream. His historic plane, the Winnie Mae, is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
