He had one eye, a sixth-grade education and a criminal record. He was also, by any honest measure, one of the greatest pilots who ever lived. Wiley Post circled the planet alone before most people had ever sat in an aeroplane, built the suit that made high-altitude flight possible, and stumbled onto a river of wind we now call the jet stream.

Then, at the height of his fame, he flew America’s best-loved humorist into an Alaskan lagoon and killed them both. This is the story of the one-eyed Oklahoman who kept getting to the future first.

From roughneck to record-breaker

Post was born in Texas in 1898 and grew up on Oklahoma farms. He drifted through the oilfields as a “roughneck,” did a stretch in a reformatory for armed robbery, and might have vanished into obscurity entirely — except that in October 1926 a splinter of metal destroyed his left eye. He took the insurance settlement and bought an aeroplane.

He learned the trade barnstorming and parachuting, then became personal pilot to a wealthy Oklahoma oilman, F.C. Hall, who owned a sleek Lockheed Vega he had named the Winnie Mae after his daughter. In Post’s hands, that aircraft was about to become one of the most famous in the world.

Newsreel footage of Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae from 1933.

Around the world — twice

In June 1931, Post and the Australian navigator Harold Gatty set out from New York to fly around the world. They came home eight days, fifteen hours and fifty-one minutes later, having covered more than 15,000 miles — the first circumnavigation by a single-engine monoplane, and a reception to rival Lindbergh’s.

For most pilots that would have been a career. Post decided to do it again — alone. He fitted the Winnie Mae with two pieces of barely-proven technology: a Sperry autopilot and a radio direction finder, machines to do the navigator’s job. In July 1933 he flew around the world solo in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes, and fifty thousand people mobbed the field when he landed. He was the first human being to circle the Earth alone.

A British Movietone newsreel marking Post’s 1933 solo circumnavigation.

A suit for the edge of space

Having conquered distance, Post went after altitude. The Winnie Mae’s wooden cabin could not be pressurised, so in 1934 he worked with Russell Colley of B.F. Goodrich to build the world’s first practical pressure suit — rubber, canvas and an aluminium diver’s helmet, the direct ancestor of every spacesuit that followed.

Sealed inside it, Post climbed above 40,000 feet over Chicago and eventually reached the neighbourhood of 50,000 feet. Up there he noticed his ground speed leaping far beyond what the engine alone could explain. He had flown into the jet stream — the high-altitude wind rivers that airliners ride to this day — and become the first person to use them.

The last flight

In 1935 Post built a hybrid floatplane from the fuselage of a Lockheed Orion and the wings of a wrecked Lockheed Explorer, planning to survey a route to Russia. His close friend Will Rogers — humorist, film star and the most beloved man in America — asked to come along to gather material for his newspaper column, writing at his typewriter as Post flew.

On 15 August 1935, near Point Barrow, Alaska, they landed in a lagoon to ask directions in bad weather. On take-off the engine failed at low altitude. The nose-heavy aircraft rolled and plunged into the shallow water, and both men died instantly.

A nation grieved twice over — for its favourite wit and for the one-eyed aviator who had kept dragging the future into view. The Winnie Mae hangs today in the Smithsonian, and every high-altitude flight, every spacesuit, every airliner surfing the jet stream is, in some small way, Wiley Post’s.

Archival footage of Wiley Post, Harold Gatty and the Winnie Mae from 1931 and 1933.

Sources: Wiley Post (Wikipedia); Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Around the World in Eight Days, Post & Gatty; Bryan Sterling, Forgotten Eagle; History.com.