Forgotten eagle

Wiley Post set records. In the summer of 1931 with navigator Harold Gatty he flew his single-engine airplane, the Winniw Mae, around the globe in a record-breaking eight days. Two years later he shaved twenty-one hours off his own record, and this time he did it flying solo. The country went wild; in Wiley Post a nation in the grip of the Great Depression found a hero and in the flight of the Winnie Mae a legend.

History, though, has not been kind to Wiley Post. It has footnoted the pioneering airman who flew the “high wind” at stratospheric altitude and the inventive aviator who designed the prototypes for astronauts’ space suits. Unlike his contemporaries Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post has virtually disappeared, too, from the popular lore that grew out of American aviation in the earlier decades of the twentieth century.

This book remembers the eagle that history has forgotten. Meticulously researched by biographers Bryan Sterling and Frances Sterling, it follows Wiley Post from his poverty-stricken boyhood in rural Texas to the Sweeney Auto School in Kansas City. Missouri; from a thwarted attempt at armed robbery that landed him in prison to the booming oil fields of Oklahoma. There, in 1927, as a result of an accident on a drilling rig, Post lost his left eye–a handicap that he did not allow to impede his new career as a parachute jumper, then stunt pilot, barnstormer, and record-setting ace aviator.