| Two Men in a Hurry |
| When, seven years ago, a barnstorming pilot in a rickety biplane landed on the Oklahoma farm of a horny, weatherbeaten dirt-farming couple named Post, their son —a slight fellow whose swarthy skin revealed his Indian blood—proceeded to palm himself off to the pilot as a parachute jumper and wing-walker. The barnstormer was gullible and Wiley Post became a jumper. Jumping did not hold him for long. Soon it was: "I'd give an eye to be able to fly." One day at his work in an oil field, hot metal chip flew into his face, burned out his left eye. The company paid $2,000 damages. With this Wiley Post bought his first plane. (Editors note: Wiley Post is of Scotts/Irish ancestry, not native American) One noonday last week, this swarthy fellow, who now has a small mustache and a glass eye, found himself alongside the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railroad at Irkutsk. With him was a huge bullet-shaped white monoplane, named "The Winnie Mae of Oklahoma", and a rangy, thin- lipped young Australian named Harold Gatty, one of the most respected aviators in the U. S. Besieged by an excited group of Russian officials, the two fliers turned immediately to the business of refuelling the Winnie Mae and checking a course across the desolate Yablonoi Mountains to Blagovyeschensk. There was no time to celebrate the fact that they had come just half way around the world from New York (8,050 mi.) in 3 days, 19 hr. True, they were 28 hours ahead of their Round-The-World-In-Ten-Days schedule; true, too, that they had but eight hours sleep since leaving New York. But some of their most arduous traveling lay ahead of them over the unbroken forests of Siberia and the wilderness from Nome to Edmonton, Canada, and then they might need time to spare. ... In a little more than two hours they were off again, with a wave of the hand, into that part of the East where miles are longest and life is scarcest. Three days, 19 hours before at Roosevelt Field, Pilot Post had looked out into the darkness from the toneau cover of an automobile in which he was chatting with a friend and observed that the rain was slacking. "All right, Harold; let's go," he had said, as he might have suggested "Let's go to the movies." To a small group of drenched spectators, "Somebody want to crank me up?" The light of photographers' flares and the stabbing finger of a revolving beacon picked out the white Lockheed at the head of the runway for a moment. Then a roar from the supercharged Wasp motor, a streak down the field, and the Winnie Mae's navigating lights were blinking a "goodbye" from the North. It was not yet noon—less than seven hours later—when the Winnie Mae sat down upon the airport at Harbor Grace, Newfoundland 1153 miles up the coast. Three irritating hours later, Winnie Mae shot out over the Atlantic, spanked along by a 30-mile breeze. For the first part of his ocean trip Pilot Post had "little to do." He lounged in his upholstered chair, one hand resting lightly on the stick, his good right eye glued to compass, tachometer, altimeter. He was where he was because, after an excellent record as test pilot for the Lockheed factory, he got a job as aerial chauffeur for Frank C. Hall, onetime drug clerk who struck a fortune in Oklahoma oil. In this same plane, named for the oilman's daughter Mrs. Winnie Mae Fain, Post won the Los Angeles-Chicago air derby last year. Then Hall financed him for the attempt to break the round-world record of the Graff Zeppelin—21 days, 7 hr. Busier than Pilot Post as the Winnie Mac streaked over the water was Harold Gatty. Cramped into a tiny space behind a wall of special fuel tanks he alternately poked his sextant through a port in the roof, scribbled his computations, passed written directions to the pilot, and pumped gasoline up into the wing tanks. Hard work, but nothing compared to the ordeal of last summer when he and Harold Bromley got 200 mi from Japan in an attempt flight to the U. S. and then had to fight their way back to shore with a broken exhaust ring spewing carbon monoxide gas into the cabin. That put him in a hospital for two months. This navigating business had been his forte since he entered the Royal Australian Naval College at 13. For many years he was a mariner, then studied aerial navigation under famed Lieut. Commander Philip Van Horn Weems U. S. N., later taught the Weems system, instructed Mrs. Charles Augustus Lindbergh at request of her husband. But the best of navigators is impotent with neither sky nor horizon to work with, and that was the Winnie Mae's situation halfway across the Atlantic. "I don't think we can honestly say we were lost," Post said later, "but we just didn't know where we were" when they found themselves over land next morning. They spotted an airport, landed, asked: "Is this England, Scotland or Wales?"* It was Sealand Aerodrome near Chester, England, 16 hr. 17 minutes from Harbor Grace. n a little less than two hours the Winnie Mae was off for Berlin, landed first at Hanover by mistake. Fatigue was beginning to tell, for Post neglected to refuel there and turned back to Hanover again 15 minute after leaving. The sun was just setting, the moon just brightening when the monoplane dropped upon busy Templehof Field. The crowds broke, poured across the field with shouted "Hochs" and "Kolossals," swept the now utterly exhausted Post and Gatty to their shoulders. Feebly they tried to sip proffered champagne and immediately begged for ice water. At the airport hotel sympathetic officials finally desisted from their rapid-fire questioning, put food on the flyers' plates and bade them eat. At 11 pm they were in bed (Gatty had fallen asleep in the bathtub). At 7:30 they were Moscow bound. It was mean flying across Poland and into Russia, 1,000 miles of "hedgehopping" under a creeping low ceiling of fog and rain. But Post & Gatty appeared fresh and vigorous to the Ossoviakhim (Soviet Society for Aviation and Chemical Defense) who greeted them late that after- noon. Someone in the crowd offered Gatty a Russian cigaret, but he was still smoking from a pack bought in New York, "day before yesterday." There was a nine-course dinner at the Grand Hotel, champagne spurned again by the fliers. Two hours rest, then out to the airport soon after midnight. Here the take-off was delayed because Russian mechanics, confusing gallons and litres, had overloaded the plane, and the excess fuel had to be siphoned out. It was 5 a.m., when the Winnie Mae roared into the East again. Still clipping off 150 m.p. it fol- lowed the Trans-Sib over the Ural mountains, landed after eleven hours at Novo Sibirsk. Another respite of eight hours, then on to Irkutsk and the half way mark, 1,050 miles farther. Back in Maysville, Okla., Brother Arthur Post ran to and fro between town and farm with news of the Winnie Mae's progress, but the pilot's elderly parents were too busy with cutting hay on their 90-acre farm to drop their work. In a general way they were proud of Son Wiley, although "he didn't have our blessing when he started out in this flying business." But the simple fact of his safety meant more to them than the geography of Siberia. At Blagovyeschensk, 850 miles beyond Irkutsk, the fliers encountered their first serious trouble when the Winnie Mae mired in mud. It was 14 hours before a detachment of soldiers with a USA made tractor pulled the plane out. At Khabarovsk Post and Gatty deliberately sacrificed another 26 hours of their ahead of schedule time by giving their plane a minute overhaul, and taking 12 hours' sleep in preparation for the hazardous 2,100 mile dash to Nome. They took off in the face of doubtful weather over the Gulf of Tartary, the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Bering Sea. This is the season of the 24-hour Arctic day. They reached Alaska without mishap, went on. The Winnie Mae stood in good chance of completing her course (via Edmonton and Cleveland) to Roosevelt Field on the tenth day. |
| Harold Gatty's Famous Flight |
Monday, Jul. 06, 1931
| Time Magazine |
Click hangar for home page
| Flights & Flyers Via Brewery: While the rival whom he failed to beat was starting after fresh triumphs, hapless Jimmie Mattern was fretting and fuming at Anadyr, the isolated Siberian settlement where he was rescued fortnight ago (TIME, July 17). He had recovered from the effects of two weeks starvation, and he was able to hobble around on his broken ankle. All he wanted now was a chance to complete the first solo flight around the world before Wiley Post could snare that honor too. His Lockheed Century of Progress was a wreck where it had cracked up in the wilderness, result of a frozen oil line. He needed another plane. A Brooklyn brewer whom he had never met turned out to be his pillar of hope. When Jimmie Mattern was first lost, a group of friends at Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y. were determined to find him. In their search for funds someone introduced them to Irving Friedman, sleek president of Brooklyn's Kings Brewery. Brewer Friedman is no flyer. But "they sounded so sincere, don't you know?" He gave them money to buy the sturdy old Bellanca which Pangborn & Herndon flew around the world. Off to Alaska went the rescue party, headed by Pilots William Alexander & Fred Fetterman. Mattern turned up in Siberia. A U. S. plane could not fly there without Soviet permission, nor could a Russian plane take Mattern to Nome without U. S. permission. But Moscow and Washington are not on speaking terms. Thus began a long and devious exchange of messages between the capitals through the office of Brewer Friedman. Struggling with unpronounceable Russian names, he took Moscow cablegrams from Boris Skivrsky, unofficial Soviet representative in Washington, relayed them to the State Department, got replies and shot them back to Mr. Skvirsky. The upshot was permission for the Soviet pilot Levanovsky to deliver Mattern to Nome, where Brewer Friedman's rescue plane will be turned over to him for a plucky last lap. Winnie Mae: ''Do be careful," Mrs.Mae Laine Post begged. "O. K.," replied her stocky, swart, one-eyed husband, Wiley. A few minutes later Pilot Post climbed into his big white-&-purple Lockheed monoplane The Winnie Mae of Oklahoma and roared away from Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y., on his second flight around the world. Two years ago with Navigator Harold Gatty, he made an 8½-day record which he now proposed to beat by a generous margin. He was flying alone this time, but with a Sperry automatic pilot and a directional radio. Through fog, heavy clouds and snow, Pilot Post, robot & radio cut a superbly accurate course to Berlin in the phenomenal time of 25 hr. 45 min. The slowness of mechanics at Tempelhof Airdrome enraged him. "Damn it, I want to push on," he fumed, and paced the field impatiently for two hours while mechanics turned the cranks of slow fuel- pumps. Off again, Winnie Mae got to the Russian border, was driven by thunderstorms back to Koenigsberg, East Prussia, where Pilot Post grudgingly took five hours sleep, vowing not to shut his eyes again until reaching Alaska. The Winnie Mae thundered out of Moscow a half-day ahead of schedule. But an oil leak was causing the robot to misbehave and Pilot Post had practically all the burden of solo flying. Twice he got lost in dirty weather over Siberian wilderness, but found Novosibirsk by sheer skill and luck. He had stretched his lead to 17 hr. upon bounding out of Novosibirsk for Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Fairbanks, Edmonton and home. Homecoming: When Wiley Post started his round-the-world flight two years ago he was followed across the Atlantic by two men (Hillig & Hoiriis) in a Bellanca. They wanted to get home to Germany and Denmark in a blaze of glory. Last week Pilot Post was trailed by another Bellanca with two glory-seeking Lithuanians, Stephen Darius & Stanley Girenas. Adventurous barnstormers, they met in the U. S. two years ago, resolved to fly home to Kovno. To finance the flight they got scores of Lithuanians to pay $25 or more to have their names painted on the sides of the plane Lithuanica. Hundreds of others paid $1 for listing in a "Book of Honor" which was to be taken in the plane to the Kovno Museum. All was ready last week except one essential: they had not obtained permission to fly over foreign countries en route. By Department of Commerce rule they could not take off. They loaded their ship to the roof with fuel, told the manager of Floyd Bennett Field they were going up for a "load test"—which he was powerless to prevent, despite the fact that they also took food supplies aboard. Groaning under its heavy load, the plane took all but a few feet of the mile-long runway before staggering into the air. Two days later at Soldin, 65 miles from Berlin, was found the wreck of the Lithuanica, the dead bodies of its pilots. Hopelessly lost, they had searched through the night for a landing place, until their fuel ran out. |
| Flights & Flyers |
Time Magazine
Monday, Jul. 24, 1933
