Home |  PublicationsEncyclopediaWinnie Mae

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae
(2012.201.B1028.0550, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, OHS).

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture The Oklahoma Historical Society Oklahoma City, Oklahoma January 15, 2010

WINNIE MAE.

Wiley Post's record-setting airplane, the Winnie Mae was a single-winged, seven-passenger Lockheed 5C (modified 5B) Vega. Painted white with purple trim, it was eight feet, two inches tall and twenty-seven feet, six inches long. It possessed a forty-one-foot wingspan and weighed 2,595 pounds. Both the plane and its original 420-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine were repeatedly modified.

The Winnie Mae was purchased for twenty-two thousand dollars in June 1930 by oilman Florence C. ("F. C.") Hall of Chickasha and was named for his daughter. Two months later Wiley Post, Hall's personal pilot, utilized the plane to win a Los Angeles-to-Chicago air race. In June 1931 Post, accompanied by navigator Harold Gatty, piloted the Winnie Mae around the world in a record eight days, fifteen hours, and fifty-one minutes. Post subsequently acquired the airplane from Hall and flew it solo around the world in July 1933. His time was seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine and one-half minutes.

Post used the Winnie Mae to conduct high-altitude flights beginning in 1934. Since its construction prohibited cabin pressurization, he developed the first pressurized flight suit. On December 7, 1934, Post set an unofficial record by flying the craft to an estimated fifty thousand feet above Bartlesville. After four unsuccessful transcontinental flights through the substratosphere, the airplane was retired. Post's widow sold the Winnie Mae and its original instruments to the Smithsonian Institution in August 1935. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the Winnie Mae was on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia.

Jon D. May

Bibliography

Bob Burke, From Oklahoma to Eternity: The Life of Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 1998).

Stanley R. Mohler and Bobby Johnson, Wiley Post, His Winnie Mae, and the World's First Pressure Suit (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971).

"Winnie Mae," Vertical File, Research Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.


Browse By Topic

Transportation

Explore

Objects

Citation

The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Jon D. May, “Winnie Mae,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WI030.

Published January 15, 2010

Copyright and Terms of Use

No part of this site may be construed as in the public domain.

Copyright to all articles and other content in the online and print versions of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History is held by the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS). This includes individual articles (copyright to OHS by author assignment) and corporately (as a complete body of work), including web design, graphics, searching functions, and listing/browsing methods. Copyright to all of these materials is protected under United States and International law.

Users agree not to download, copy, modify, sell, lease, rent, reprint, or otherwise distribute these materials, or to link to these materials on another web site, without authorization of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Individual users must determine if their use of the Materials falls under United States copyright law's "Fair Use" guidelines and does not infringe on the proprietary rights of the Oklahoma Historical Society as the legal copyright holder of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and part or in whole.