Charles Lindbergh and Ameila Earhart are remembered better today, but neither one accomplished what the aviator from Van Zandt County, Texas, did. Wiley Post was hardly aviation royalty or harbored dreams of breaking barriers, be they social or geographical — he was the son of Oklahoma farmers and lost his left eye during an oil field accident. But he did use the settlement payout from the accident to buy himself an airplane, and start to win races with it.

On this day, July 22, in 1933, Wiley Post landed in Floyd Bennet Field, in New York, exactly where he took off from 186 hours and 49 minutes previously on a world-circumnavigating flight. In yet another first, Post did not use a human navigator. His unique autopilot system picked up signals from the land and used those to orient the plan on its path.

The globe-rounding flight was not even Wiley Post’s first: he had previously done it with a navigator on board, Harold Gatty. The first flight, taking a similar course in hopping across continents, was intended to break the record time set by the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin — which took a full three weeks.