Ormer Locklear, the Army Instructor Who Climbed Out of the Cockpit to Fix a Radiator and Invented Wing-Walking, Then Died Chasing One More Shot for Hollywood

Ormer Locklear was a U.S. Army flight instructor who invented wing-walking in 1918 at Barron Field near Fort Worth, Texas, when he climbed out of a moving airplane to make an in-flight repair. He turned the stunt into a barnstorming and Hollywood career before dying in a filming accident on August 2, 1920, at age 28. His daring helped define the barnstorming era and, indirectly, the safety regulations that followed.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

In 1918, with the Great War winding down, the U.S. Army was racing to train military aviators as fast as it could. One of the busy training bases was Barron Field, near Fort Worth, Texas, where a young lieutenant named Ormer Locklear taught cadets the fundamentals of flight.

The trainer they flew was the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the “Jenny” - a gentle, forgiving biplane of wood, fabric, and wire, with two open cockpits and a water-cooled engine that produced about 90 horsepower on a good day. She cruised at roughly 60 to 65 miles per hour, slow enough that the slipstream would push hard against a standing man without immediately tearing him away.

How Was Wing-Walking Invented?

The story goes that during a flight, something on Locklear’s Jenny needed attention - accounts differ on whether it was a loose radiator cap or a spark plug wire. Rather than land, Locklear unbuckled, climbed out of the cockpit while the airplane was flying, walked onto the lower wing holding the wires and struts, made the repair, and climbed back in.

He landed grinning. In 1918, there were no rules against leaving an aircraft in flight because no one had imagined anyone would want to. Locklear had discovered that the Jenny was steady and slow enough for a strong, balanced person to ride on the outside like a man standing in the bed of a moving truck.

So he began doing it on purpose. He learned to lie flat against the wires so the wind couldn’t peel him off, and he memorized the wing’s strong points - because a boot in the wrong spot on a fabric wing punched straight through into open air. Word spread across Barron Field that Locklear was a spectacle worth watching.

Why Did the Barnstorming Era Happen?

The war ended in November 1918, and that ending created the barnstorming era. The Army no longer needed thousands of pilots or the airplanes it had ordered, so it sold surplus Curtiss Jennies for as little as a few hundred dollars - an airplane for the price of a used car.

Suddenly the country had two things loose at once: thousands of trained pilots with no jobs, and thousands of cheap airplanes. So the pilots invented work. They would buzz a small town’s Main Street, land in a farmer’s pasture, offer the farmer a cut for the use of his field, and sell rides - about $5 to see your own farm from a thousand feet up.

For most people standing in those pastures in 1919, it was the first flying machine they had ever seen, let alone touched. This - not the airlines or the airmail - was how aviation first reached ordinary Americans.

From Wing-Walker to Movie Star

By 1920, so many barnstormers crisscrossed the country that a simple ride was hard to sell. Pilots had to offer a show. When Locklear mustered out of the Army, he teamed with two other pilots, Milton Elliott and Shirley Short, and built an act around hanging his life off the edge of an airplane.

He stood on the top wing in the full slipstream while the plane rolled and dove. He hung upside down by his knees from the landing gear axle. He did handstands on the wing. And he performed his showstopper: the plane change, climbing from one flying Jenny up a trailing rope ladder into a second one at altitude - with no parachute, which most barnstormers of the era flew without.

The danger wasn’t decoration; it was the product. Crowds came by the tens of thousands because they knew they might witness a man’s death. Hollywood noticed. A producer signed Locklear, and his first film, The Great Air Robbery, made him a genuine early movie star.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

On August 2, 1920, Locklear was filming a picture called The Skywayman. The studio wanted a dramatic night scene: his airplane would spin down toward searchlight-lit oil derricks and pull out at the last second for the cameras.

Locklear and Milton Elliott - his partner from the circuit - arranged a safety signal with the ground crew. When it was time to recover from the dive, the crew would cut the searchlights. In the dark, low over the derricks with lights in his eyes, a pilot has no visible horizon; the lights going out were his only cue that he had reached the bottom and needed to pull up.

The Jenny came screaming down in a spin, exactly as planned - but the searchlights never went out. Without his cue, Locklear had no way to judge the ground. He and Elliott hit near the base of the derricks and both were killed instantly. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old. The cameras captured the crash, and the studio kept the footage in the finished film to sell tickets.

Why Locklear’s Story Still Matters

The barnstorming years were glorious and reckless at once. All that dying - funerals for young pilots in small-town cemeteries throughout the early 1920s - pushed the country to demand rules: licenses for pilots, inspections for airplanes, limits on low flying and stunts over crowds.

In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, and the federal government began licensing pilots and aircraft and regulating the wild stunts that had killed men like Locklear. The pure anything-goes barnstorming era was essentially over by the end of the decade. Those rules, as the saying goes, were written in blood - and some of them have Locklear’s name behind them.

The line runs straight from that farmer’s field to modern aviation. Surviving barnstormers became airmail pilots, crop dusters, flight instructors, and airline captains. Charles Lindbergh himself walked wings and jumped for paying crowds before flying the Spirit of St. Louis to Paris.

And wing-walking never died. At any major airshow today, a performer rides the top wing of a Stearman, arms out over the crowd - now rigged safely with harnesses, inspections, and a hard deck. Every one of them stands on that wing because a Texas lieutenant climbed out of his cockpit over Barron Field in 1918, looked at the sky rushing past, and decided he liked it out there.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1918 at Barron Field near Fort Worth, Texas, after climbing out of a flying Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” to make a mid-air repair.
• The barnstorming era was fueled by surplus Jennies sold for a few hundred dollars and thousands of jobless post-war pilots after the war ended in November 1918.
• Locklear became an early Hollywood star, performing parachute-free stunts including the plane change between two aircraft in flight.
• He died on August 2, 1920, at age 28, filming The Skywayman when a ground crew failed to cut the searchlights that were his signal to pull out of a dive; his partner Milton Elliott died with him.
• Deaths like his helped prompt the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which introduced pilot and aircraft licensing and ended the pure barnstorming era.