At 11:50 p.m. on July 22, 1933, Wiley Post throttled back the engine of his Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae and rolled to a stop at Floyd Bennett Field, Long Island. He had departed the same field seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes earlier, and in that span had circled the Northern Hemisphere alone. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma oil-field roughneck turned aerial conquistador, had already circled the world once with navigator Harold Gatty in 1931. This time he had no navigator, only a Sperry autopilot and a radio direction finder to keep him on track. He flew from New York to Berlin, then Moscow, Novosibirsk, and across the Bering Strait to Alaska. At Flat, Alaska, he damaged a propeller and replaced it with a spare he carried in the cabin. Eleven fuel stops, a bent propeller, and a gyroscope repair were all that interrupted his rhythm. The 15,596-mile flight shattered every existing global speed record and demonstrated that a single pilot, armed with emerging radio and autopilot technology, could command a world-girdling journey. When Howard Hughes later circled the globe in 1938 with a crew and the most advanced equipment money could buy, he still declared: “Wiley Post’s flight remains the most remarkable flight in history. It can never be duplicated. He did it alone!”