Ormer Locklear, King of the Wing Walkers, and the Night Dive Over DeMille Field

Ormer Locklear was the first true wing walker, a former Army pilot who invented aerial stunting during the barnstorming era of 1919-1920. He pioneered the wing walk and the mid-air plane-to-plane transfer before dying at age 28 in a filmed night crash at DeMille Field in Los Angeles on August 2, 1920. In roughly three years of flying, he created an entire art form and laid the groundwork for a technique that would evolve into modern aerial refueling.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in Greenville, Texas, and was a daredevil long before he ever saw an airplane. As a boy he climbed the town water tower just to feel his heart race. He rode motorcycles and walked ridgepoles. He was simply not wired to fear the things that frighten sensible people.

In 1917, as the United States entered the Great War, Locklear signed up in Fort Worth to fly for the Army Air Service. He was sent to train on the aircraft that would define his short, spectacular career.

The Curtiss Jenny: The Airplane That Made It Possible

They trained him on the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the “Jenny.” She was a big, gentle, honest biplane of wood, wire, and doped fabric. Her OX-5 engine produced 90 horsepower, and she topped out around 75 miles an hour if you were patient about it.

The crucial detail for Locklear’s story is this: the Jenny was remarkably stable. Trimmed properly, she would fly hands-off, holding a gentle turn on her own while the pilot did something else entirely.

That “something else” is where the legend began.

How Wing Walking Was Invented

During training, something came loose on the top wing of Locklear’s Jenny - a radiator cap, as the story is usually told. Most cadets would have landed and let a mechanic handle it. Locklear instead throttled back, trimmed the airplane level, and climbed out of the cockpit into a hundred-mile-an-hour wind to fix it himself.

He wore no parachute, no harness, and no safety line. Nobody did then. He simply planted his boots on the lower wing, gripped the bracing wires, and walked out into the sky while the airplane flew itself.

His instructors were horrified - and then fascinated. Soon Locklear and fellow cadets Milton Elliott and Shirley Short were moving around on the airframe in flight. The Army eventually decided this had practical value: a man who could move on the airframe might clear a jam or fix a problem and save an aircraft. For a time, the practice was more or less officially blessed.

From War’s End to the Barnstorming Circuit

The war ended in November 1918, before Locklear ever shipped overseas. He left the Army in the spring of 1919 at age 27, facing the same wall that stopped many young pilots: the Army no longer needed them, and airplanes were expensive.

But Locklear had an act.

The timing was perfect. The government was selling surplus Curtiss Jennys for a few hundred dollars, putting airplanes within reach of anyone with nerve. Meanwhile, millions of Americans had read about aircraft during the war but never seen one. So the pilots came to them - buzzing small-town main streets, landing in farmers’ pastures, and selling rides for five dollars a head.

Most barnstormers sold loops and spins. Locklear sold something no one had ever seen.

The Act That Made Him Famous

With Milton Elliott usually flying the Jenny, Locklear would take off and then, low over the crowd, stand up and climb onto the wing. He walked out to the wingtip and stood with arms outstretched as the airplane tilted beneath him. He hung from the landing gear by his knees. He stood on the top wing with nothing to hold onto.

Crowds were overwhelmed. The newspapers ran out of adjectives and dubbed him the “King of the Wing Walkers” and the “Human Fly.”

Then he raised the stakes with the stunt that has arguably never been topped for pure nerve: the plane-to-plane transfer.

Two Jennys flew formation - no radios, station-keeping by eyeball and hand signals, the lower airplane bouncing in the turbulence of the upper one. Into the gap between two moving aircraft, hundreds of feet up and framed by spinning propellers, Locklear climbed a rope ladder or reached across to transfer from one airplane to the other in mid-air. He performed it across the country throughout 1919.

Hollywood and the Move to Los Angeles

Hollywood came calling. Universal signed him and cast him in The Great Air Robbery (1919), which did well. Locklear moved to Los Angeles and briefly became a genuine movie star - a fine rented house, good suits, and a romance with actress Viola Dana. By every account he remained charming and generous, keeping his small-town Texas warmth even at the height of national fame.

The Night Dive Over DeMille Field

In the summer of 1920, Locklear was filming The Skywayman for the Fox Film Corporation. The finale called for a night scene: a spinning, engine-out dive toward an oil field, with derricks lit by searchlights and magnesium flares for the cameras.

For a pilot, a deliberate spin toward the ground at night is among the most dangerous maneuvers imaginable, and it comes down to one thing - judging your height. At night, over an oil field, there is no horizon and no reliable sense of distance to the ground. Worse, the very searchlights illuminating the shot destroy a pilot’s night vision and depth perception.

Locklear understood the danger. The plan, as reported, was that the searchlights would be cut at a set point to signal him that he had descended far enough to pull out.

On the night of August 2, 1920, at DeMille Field in Los Angeles, Locklear and his longtime pilot Milton Elliott took the Jenny up into the dark. They set up the dive, and the biplane came spiraling down through the beams, engine silent, exactly the shot the director wanted.

The searchlights never cut.

The signal to pull out never came, or came too late. With no horizon and no way to judge the black ground rushing up, Locklear and Elliott rode the spin all the way down into the oil field. Both men were killed instantly. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old.

The cameras rolled the entire time. Fox released the picture anyway - with the real crash in it - and advertised it. That was the film industry of the era.

Why Ormer Locklear Still Matters

Locklear flew for only about three years total - learning in the war and dead by the summer of 1920. Yet in that sliver of time he invented an entire art form out of nothing but nerve and a stable biplane.

Every wing walker who has ever thrilled a crowd, every aerobatic performer at Sun ’n Fun or Oshkosh, descends in a straight line from the Texas boy who climbed out of a Jenny to fix a radiator cap and discovered he liked the view.

His legacy runs deeper still. The plane-to-plane transfer he pioneered became the direct ancestor of aerial refueling. Every tanker crew passing fuel to a fighter at altitude is performing a refined, disciplined version of the feat Locklear did bare-handed for a laughing crowd in 1919.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear was the first true wing walker, discovering the stunt during Army training on a stable Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” when he climbed out to fix a loose part in flight.
• He pioneered the mid-air plane-to-plane transfer in 1919, a feat considered the direct ancestor of modern aerial refueling.
• Fame took him to Hollywood, where he starred in The Great Air Robbery (1919) for Universal.
• He died at age 28 on August 2, 1920, crashing during a filmed night dive at DeMille Field when the searchlights that were supposed to signal his pullout never cut.
• Despite flying for only about three years, Locklear founded the entire tradition of aerial stunt performance that continues at airshows today.