Forgotten Eagle: Wiley Post, America's Heroic Aviation Pioneer

Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, as the world remembers, and Amelia Earhart, who never completed her round-the-world flight with navigator Frederick Noonan in their twin-engine Lockheed, became a legend. Yet the contemporary of these two pioneers in early aviation, Wiley Post--the pilot who circled the earth alone in a single-engine plane, who flew at sub-stratospheric altitudes and discovered the jet stream, and who designed the prototypes for astronauts' space suits--has been largely, and perhaps officially, ignored in history and American folklore. Until now. Based on thirty years of research, this biography by Bryan and Frances Sterling reconstructs the adventurous life of Wiley Post from his poverty-stricken boyhood on a farm in Texas to a certificate from the Sweeney Auto School in Kansas City, Missouri, to a brief career in armed robbery that sent him to prison in 1921. It was in the oil fields of Oklahoma that ex-con Post lost his left eye, a handicap that he did not allow to impede his career as a parachute jumper, stunt pilot, barnstormer, and record-setting ace aviator. Post's incredible career ended in 1935, with a fatal crash in Barrow, Alaska, that also killed his passenger, the great American humorist Will Rogers. As in their comprehensive account of the enigmatic Wiley Post's life, the Sterlings leave no official record or government file unturned in their thoroughgoing investigation of the mystery that has long surrounded this maverick aviator's death.