Wiley Post Flies High

WILEY POST WAS AN EIGHTH-GRADE DROPOUT who had served a year in prison for stealing a car. But after he lost an eye in an accident while working in an oil field, he used part of the $1,698 settlement to buy and restore an airplane, and by 1931, when he was 32, he was a world-famous record-breaking aviator. Three years later he was flying higher than anyone had before, with the help of the world’s first pressurized flight suit, which he had conceived himself.

After youthful misadventures he became a daredevil barnstormer and the personal pilot for an Oklahoma oil magnate named F. C. Hall. With Hall’s backing, he and a navigator set out in a modified Lockheed Vega, Winnie Mae , in 1931 and circumnavigated the globe in less than nine days. Two years later he took off on a solo around-the-world flight and completed it 21 hours faster.

Next he decided that the jet stream—high westerly winds of the stratosphere—would be key to improved airplane performance and decided to try to fly in it. He couldn’t afford to replace the Winnie Mae , and its wooden fuselage was clearly unsuitable for pressurization, so he decided he’d have to pressurize himself.

He approached the B. F. Goodrich tire company in Akron and asked it to develop a pressure suit inspired partly by the suits worn by deep-sea divers. In the spring of 1934 Goodrich engineers fabricated their first prototype from a double layer of parachute silk. It cost $75. The two-piece outfit came with pigskin gloves, rubber boots, and an aluminum helmet, and it was so stiff that Post had to be lowered into the Winnie Mae ’s cockpit. Pressure tests soon proved it was leaky at the seams.

Goodrich then appointed an engineer named Russell S. Colley to improve the design. Colley fitted metal hoops to the elbow and knee joints so that Post could get in and out of his plane unaided. But the pilot meanwhile put on weight, and one day he got stuck inside the suit and had to be cut out of it. A second redesign followed.

The final suit was in one piece and amounted to a human-bearing tire, with an airtight, pressurized inner tube. The helmet was a tall metal cylinder, and Post peered put of it through a round, flat, screwed-in faceplate. A hose provided oxygen for both inflation and breathing from a liquid oxygen tank in the cockpit. A regulator below the left knee controlled the suit’s pressure.

Post made two brief tests of the suit inside a pressure chamber and then decided to make a splash at the Chicago world’s fair. Clad in the suit, he coaxed the Winnie Mae up to an unofficial world record altitude of 40,000 feet. It was the first airplane flight ever in the stratosphere.

That so impressed Will D. Parker, an executive of Phillips Petroleum, that he agreed to sponsor an attempt to fly coast to coast in the stratosphere. Post prepared the Winnie Mae for the attempt at Lockheed headquarters in Burbank with the help of a young engineer named Clarence L. (“Kelly”) Johnson, who went on to fame as the head of the Lockheed “Skunk Works.” To reduce drag, they designed a wheeled undercarriage that could be jettisoned in flight. The plane would land on a metal-covered spruce skid on its underside.

In Post’s first try at the flight, on February 22, 1935, the engine’s cylinders seized up, and he glided to a landing in the Mojave Desert, terrifying the owner of a local general store whom he asked for help removing his helmet. It turned out that a jealous fellow barnstormer had had abrasive powder put into the supercharger.

On March 15 he got as far as Cleveland before his oxygen ran out. Two other attempts followed; then he decided the Winnie Mae was too worn out for further tries. But he had proved the practicality of pressurized flight and had approached ground speeds of 340 mph, more than a third faster than the plane’s normal maximum.

On August 15, 1935, just two months after his last stratosphere flight, Post made his final takeoff, in a seaplane in Alaska. The engine stopped at a low altitude, and both he and his passenger, the humorist Will Rogers, were instantly killed. Russell Colley later went on to design pressurized suits for the Navy in World War II and for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. As for Post himself, in the words of the aviation historian Stanley Mohler, every time an airline pilot announces a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, he “might well add that it was a one-eyed pilot, flying an obsolescent plywood airplane, who led the way to these air corridors.”