This Day in American History: Wiley Post Flies Solo Around the World
- ForAmerica
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1933, a one-eyed Oklahoma oil-field roughneck with a sixth-grade education became the first person in history to fly solo around the entire world.
At 11:50 p.m. on July 22, 1933, aviator Wiley Post touched down at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, completing a solo flight around the world in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes -- a feat no pilot had ever managed alone before. Flying his Lockheed Vega monoplane, the Winnie Mae, Post covered 15,596 miles with just 11 refueling stops, cutting 21 hours off the round-the-world record he had set two years earlier flying the same route with navigator Harold Gatty.
Post was an unlikely hero. Raised by cotton farmers in Texas and Oklahoma, he had barely a grade-school education and lost his left eye in an oil-rig accident in 1926, using the settlement money to buy his first airplane. What he lacked in formal training he made up for with raw nerve and a mechanic's instinct -- for the solo flight, he outfitted the Winnie Mae with a Sperry automatic pilot, nicknamed "Mechanical Mike," and a radio direction finder, proving that instruments could do some of a lone pilot's work for him across thousands of miles of ocean and wilderness. An estimated 50,000 spectators broke through barriers at Floyd Bennett Field to swarm the plane the moment it landed.
Post went on to pioneer high-altitude flight, developing one of the world's first pressurized flight suits and discovering the jet stream in the process. He was killed two years later, in 1935, in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside his close friend, humorist Will Rogers. The Winnie Mae itself now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, a monument to an oil-field roughneck who decided the world wasn't big enough to keep him from circling it twice.
Also on this day:
1781 -- Thomas Jefferson becomes the first head of the U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs, forerunner to the State Department.
1862 -- Lincoln informs his cabinet he intends to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, though he waits for a Union victory to announce it.
1864 -- Confederate forces attack Sherman's army outside Atlanta in the Battle of Atlanta, but fail to break the siege.
1934 -- Notorious bank robber John Dillinger is killed by federal agents outside a Chicago theater.
2003 -- U.S. forces kill Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, during a raid near Mosul, Iraq.
A one-eyed farm kid circled the entire planet alone, using instruments he helped invent along the way. That's American ingenuity in a nutshell.
Source: HISTORY.com, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Comments