Wiley Post became the first person to fly solo around the world

On July 22, 1933, a one-eyed Oklahoma aviator named Wiley Post dropped his Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae onto the grass at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, ending the first solo flight around the world. A crowd estimated in the tens of thousands had gathered to greet him.

Post had taken off from the same field a week earlier and traced a northern route through Berlin, the Soviet Union, Alaska and Canada. He covered roughly 15,600 miles in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes — bettering his own 1931 around-the-world record, which he had set with a navigator aboard.

What made the solo run possible was machinery, not just nerve.

Flying alone, Post leaned on two then-novel instruments: a Sperry autopilot that held his heading while he rested, and a radio direction finder that steered him toward transmitters along the route. The flight helped prove that long-distance navigation could be handed, in part, to the aircraft itself.