Wiley Post
Wiley Post, ca. 1898-1935. Oklahoma Hall of Fame Archives.
Born in Texas and raised in southern Oklahoma, Wiley Post dropped out of school at the age of twelve and worked as a mechanic and farmer before being sentenced to ten years in prison for robbing travelers near Ninnekah. Due to severe depression, he was released only 13 months later and soon began working as a parachute jumper and barnstormer near his family's hometown of Maysville.
He was working in the oil fields near Seminole in 1926 when a metal splinter hit him in the left eye. The eye became infected and had to be removed, thus creating challenges for his dreams of aviation and making him forever recognizable by the patch worn over his eye. With his workers' compensation settlement, Post paid $300 for an old airplane and began an amazing career in flight. His famed Lockheed Vega monoplane, nicknamed the Winnie Mae and owned by Oklahoma oilman F.C. Hall, became a historic partner in Post's dream of setting distance and time records around the world.
In 1931, Post teamed up with navigator Harold Gatty to set a new around-the-world record in only eight days. Two years later, he became the first person to fly solo around the world, beating the earlier record by almost a full day. For this second record-breaking journey, Post obtained permission from the U.S. Army Air Services to test out two new systems of the time, a radio direction finder and an autopilot, making it possible to fly without a human navigator.
After his solo flight, Post made further contributions to monoplane aviation by becoming the first high-altitude aviator. In order to make such flights possible, he needed a pressurized cabin. Because the Winnie Mae had a wooden frame and therefore could not be fully sealed, Post helped design what became the first pressurized suit. When making a successful high-altitude flight in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1934, he accidentally discovered the jet stream, the thin of which allowed for even greater flight speeds. Post's discovery paved the way for a future of stratospheric commercial and passenger flights.
For all his successes and contributions to monoplane aviation in its crucial, early years, Post's life was cut short when he joined his longtime friend, Will Rogers, on a goodwill trip to the Soviet Union. The hybrid seaplane which Post designed and used for the trip proved too nose-heavy at low altitudes. On August 15, 1935, just after taking off from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska, the plane experienced an engine failure and crashed in the lagoon's shallow waters. The two men died immediately on impact. More than 75,000 people watched as Post's funeral, the largest in Oklahoma history, was held at First Baptist Church in Oklahoma City.