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 thick 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 flew into his face, burned out his left eye. The company paid $2,000 damages. With this Wiley Post bought his first plane.

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 Winnie Mae of Oklahoma, and a rangy, thin- lipped young Australian named Harold Ciatty, one of the most respected avigators in the U. S.

Besieged by an excited group of Russian officials, the two flyers 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 hr. 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 hr. before at Roosevelt Field, Pilot Post had looked out into the darkness from the tonneau 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. N. F., 1,153 mi. 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 testpilot 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 Graf 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 i.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 mon- oxide 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 Airdrome near Chester, England, 16 hr. 17 min. from Harbor Grace.

In 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 min. 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 n p. m. 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 mi. 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 flyers. 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 mi. 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 mi. beyond Irkutsk, the flyers encountered their first serious trouble when the Winnie Mae mired in mud. It was 14 hours before a detachment of soldiers with a U. S.-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 mi. 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.

* First one-eyed pilot to fly the Atlantic, Pilot Post was not the first to try. Before him went Francis Coli, lost in 1927 with Charles Nungesser; and Walter G. Hinchliffe, lost with the Hon. Elsie Mackay in 1928. Other famed uni-oculars: Golfer Tommy Armour, Reporter Floyd Gibbons, Gatecrasher "One-Eye" Connelly, Admiral Lord Nelson, Reformer William E. ("Pussyfoot") Johnson, "Big Bill" Heywood, Fisticuffer Harry Greb.

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