Will Rogers: ambassador of good will, prince of wit and wisdom (1935)

FLYING WITH WILEY POST 223 Gatty became navigation instructor to the Army Air Corps as a result of that flight. Post resumed his duties as a pilot after purchasing the Winnie Mae from his employer. He held an agency for airplane distribution in the Southwest and then began new experiments. He equipped his plane with a robot pilot and in July, 1933, repeated his flight around the world. It was in the course of that flight that he established the record to Berlin. His record around the world he lowered to seven days, eighteen hours, and fortynine minutes. In 1934 he designed and appeared in his familiar "Man from Mars" flying suit. It was of rubber and capable of inflation to make possible constant pressures at high altitudes. He had his airplane engine specially supercharged and began a series of assaults on the altitude records. In one of his flights he claimed an altitude of more than 49,000 feet but trouble with the barograph prevented his record from becoming official. His altitude experiments were merely incidental to his real purpose in exploring the substratosphere as a medium to high-speed transport, however, and he abandoned them in favor of cross-country flights at high levels. Four times he was thwarted by mechanical failures in trying to lower the transcontinental record. Each time he took off from Los Angeles and dropped the landing gear of his plane to lessen the wind resistance. Once he was forced down on a dried lake in the Mojave Desert, another time he came