ABSTRACT
At the controls of his airplane, late on a July night in 1933, Wiley Post fell asleep. High above the Canadian Rockies, the demon of fatigue caught up with the rough-hewn Oklahoma pilot in his Lockheed Vega, Winnie Mae, on the final leg of the first solo around-the-world flight. Yet the sleepy Post did not spiral to earth (as Lindbergh had feared he would do when crossing the Atlantic five years before). Winnie Mae, without its operator’s steady hand, kept flying straight and level. The airplane shown in Figure 17 was equipped with a self-regulating machine: a prototype Sperry automatic pilot.1
