On July 22, 1933, a one-eyed Oklahoma pilot named Wiley Post landed his little wooden-and-fabric plane at Floyd Bennett Field in New York City. As he climbed out, exhausted and grinning, a crowd of 50,000 people went wild. Wiley had just done what no human had ever done before: flown solo all the way around the Earth. The trip had taken him 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, smashing his own previous record set the year before with a navigator.
Wiley's plane, the Winnie Mae, was a single-engine Lockheed Vega he had nicknamed for the daughter of its owner. To fly solo around the world, Wiley needed help to stay awake, so he relied on a brand-new gadget called an autopilot - basically a robot that could fly the plane while he napped. He also used a radio direction finder, another fresh invention. Despite all that, the trip was brutal. He flew through fog, ice, and storms, dodged exhausted-pilot mistakes, and crash-landed once in Alaska, denting his propeller. He just bent it back into shape with a rock and a wrench and took off again.
Wiley Post had lost his left eye in an oil-field accident as a teenager, but it never stopped him from chasing the sky. After his round-the-world flight, he invented the first pressure suit so pilots could fly safely at very high altitudes - a direct ancestor of today's spacesuits. He also discovered the jet stream, the river of fast wind that today's airliners ride to save fuel. From a one-eyed kid to a global aviation pioneer, Wiley Post helped invent how we fly today.
