Winnie Mae

CXVI

There were very few human beings for whom Charles Lindbergh would have had to give up his seat at the table in 1930, but among them were Wiley Post and Harold Gatty. 

Wiley Post isn’t well-remembered today, but for a brief time he nearly eclipsed Lindbergh as a Great American Hero. Post (1898-1935) like most of his contemporaries joined the war effort in 1917, but the war was over before he finished his pilot training.   

After the war, the Texas-born, Oklahoma-raised Post went to work as an oilman but his heart wasn’t in it, and he contrived to get his pilot’s license and become a barnstormer. 

Wiley Post

After a brief time barnstorming he became the personal pilot for an oil executive who owned a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae. Post raced the plane to a new world’s record on August 27, 1930, flying from Los Angeles to Chicago in 9 hours. 8 minutes and 2 seconds.

Winnie Mae in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum

In 1931, Post and his navigator Harold Gatty decided to challenge the Graf Zeppelin’s 1929 “Worldflight” record of 12 days and 1 hour of elapsed flying time (“American Voyage”) by making their own airborne circumnavigation in Winnie Mae. They left on June 23, 1931 and returned on July 1^st. Everywhere Post and Gatty flew, they were greeted by exultant crowds, and they returned to their embarkation point, Roosevelt Field in New York, in just 8 days and 15 hours and 51 minutes of elapsed flying time, besting the Graf Zeppelin by three-and-one-half days. 

During this flight, Gatty identified and named the high-altitude Jet Stream.*

In 1933, Post decided to attempt a solo circumnavigation. To do so, he had an advanced Radio Direction Finder and the world’s first autopilot, built by Sperry Gyroscope of Long Island, installed in the dependable Winnie Mae. He beat his own record, held jointly with Gatty, by circling the world in just 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes elapsed flying time. 

This time, the public reaction possibly even outmatched Lindbergh’s own.  Post received the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1932, and the Gold Medal of Belgium, and the International Harmon Trophy, both in 1934. He had several airports named for him. 

Will Rogers was a close friend of Wiley Post’s and had flown with him often. Their floatplane suffered an engine failure, crash-landing upside down in a lagoon near Nome, Alaska shortly after takeoff. Both men drowned, unable to free themselves from the wreckage

 

Undoubtedly, he would have garnered more awards and accolades, but not long after testing the first pilot pressure suit (designed to help pilots avoid oxygen deprivation blackouts and redouts during high altitude flights and altered gravity maneuvers, Post was killed in a flying accident along with his close friend and passenger, humorist and commentator Will Rogers on August 15, 1935. 

Rogers (on the wing) and Post (making notes) just a few minutes before the liftoff that led to their deaths

*Different sources claim that Jimmy Doolittle discovered the Jet Stream. It’s also possible that previous pilots had encountered the fast-moving stratospheric air current before Doolittle and / or Gatty, but Gatty is always credited with naming it.