The first man to experience jet streams

On December 7, 1934, high-altitude flight pioneer Wiley Post attempted to set a new world altitude record. Despite reaching unheard-of heights of 50,000 feet, Post’s record remained unofficial. The flight, however, enabled Post to experience jet streams first hand. A.S.Ganesh speeds through jet streams to tell you more about Post…

Do you know what jet streams are? No no, these aren’t the streams of jet that you can see when a flight cruises at speed. Don’t confuse it with an ocean current of drifting seawater either. A jet stream is a fast-moving, narrow current of air meandering in the atmosphere. 

It isn’t unique to Earth, and occurs in the atmosphere of several planets, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. On Earth, jet streams encircle the globe and are westerly winds, meaning they flow from west to east. They are located near the tropopause, which is the atmospheric boundary demarcating the troposphere and stratosphere – the two lowest layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

While the discovery of jet streams is a story unto itself, the human who first experienced it first-hand had an eventful life himself too. This was American aviation pioneer Wiley Post, a record-breaking flyer who inspired a generation of aviators. 

Born in 1898, a teenaged Post found his life’s calling during a county fair in Oklahoma in 1913. His first view of an aircraft was enough for him to realise what he wanted to do with the rest of his life – fly!

In the years that followed, he mastered the classes at an aviation school, learnt radio technology while training to be a pilot during World War I (the war ended before he completed his training), before going to work on an oil rig. The unsteady work made him turn to other means, which led him to being jailed for armed robbery before being paroled.

Returning to the oil fields, Post lost his left eye in an oil field accident in 1926, but even the partial loss of vision wouldn’t prevent him from doing what he wanted to. Instead, he used part of the settlement money to buy his first aeroplane and he was soon about to make his claims to fame.

After winning an air race from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1930, he partnered with Australian navigator Harold Gatty to fly around the world in the Lockheed Vega 5-C aircraft named Winnie Mae. They covered a distance of over 24,000 km in a record time of 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes from June 23 to July 1, 1931. Later the same year, their account of the trip was published as Around the World in Eight Days.