Ormer Locklear, the Curtiss Jenny, and the Wing Walker Who Taught America to Look Up

In the summer of 1919, a Texas daredevil named Ormer Locklear became the most famous flyer in America by doing something almost no one believed was possible: he walked on the wings of a moving airplane and stepped between two of them in midair, with no parachute and no net. He and thousands of other barnstormers, flying cheap war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, introduced ordinary Americans to flight one farm field at a time. Their reckless, joyful showmanship laid the cultural foundation for everything American aviation would become.

What Was Barnstorming?

Barnstorming was the wild first decade of civilian flight in America, roughly the 1920s, when itinerant pilots roamed the country selling airplane rides and performing aerial stunts. The name came from the practice of “storming” from town to town, landing in farmers’ fields and sleeping under the wings of their aircraft.

The whole era rode on the back of a single machine: the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the Jenny. It was never designed to be a star. The U.S. Army ordered it as a two-seat trainer, with two open cockpits arranged one behind the other and a big square nose.

Up front sat a Curtiss OX-5 engine producing roughly 90 horsepower on a good day. It leaked oil, fouled its plugs, and quit without warning. That modest power had to haul a wood, wire, and fabric biplane weighing close to a ton when loaded. The Jenny cruised at perhaps 60 to 70 miles per hour and climbed reluctantly.

Why Were There So Many Cheap Airplanes After World War I?

When the war ended, the U.S. government was left with thousands of brand-new Jennies, many still crated and never flown. It sold them off as surplus for a fraction of their cost.

A new Jenny could be purchased for a few hundred dollars - some for even less. A returning Army pilot could buy the exact type of machine he had trained on for about the price of a used car.

This created a combination America had never seen before: thousands of young men trained by the Army to fly, and thousands of cheap airplanes waiting for them. There was almost no regulation, no air traffic control, and barely a rulebook. You bought your Jenny, taught yourself the rest, and went looking for a way to make a living.

How Did Barnstormers Make Money?

The business model was simple and direct. A pilot would find a small farming town - a place where people had read about airplanes but never seen one up close - and circle low over Main Street until the entire town poured out to look up.

Then the pilot landed in a field just outside town and waited. The audience came to him, arriving on foot, on horseback, and in Model T Fords that kicked up dust for miles.

The main product was rides: about five dollars to go up, sometimes as little as a dollar in hard times. For most passengers - farmers, shopkeepers, children, grandparents - that flight was the single most extraordinary experience of their lives. Seeing their own farm, church steeple, and river laid out below them left many people in tears.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Locklear was a young man from Fort Worth, Texas, who learned to fly in Jennies as an Army trainee during the war. As barnstorming grew crowded and simple rides stopped drawing crowds, pilots had to offer something audiences had never seen. Locklear became the man who defined what that “something” was.

The origin of his legend was practical, not theatrical. During a training flight, something went wrong with his aircraft - by many accounts a radiator cap. Because of the way the Jenny was rigged, a person could climb out of the front cockpit and stand on the lower wing, holding the struts and bracing wires, while the airplane kept flying steadily on its own.

Locklear climbed out to make the fix - and discovered he loved being out there. The wing became his stage.

What Made Wing Walking So Dangerous?

Wing walking in this era carried no safety equipment whatsoever. There was no parachute. A slip, a failed wire, or a badly timed gust meant a fall of roughly a thousand feet into a field - the end of the story.

The environment itself was brutal. At 60 to 70 miles per hour, the wind was a solid, physical wall that clawed at a walker’s eyes and mouth and tried to peel him backward off the wing. The engine howled, propeller wash hammered him, the bracing wires sang a high thin note, and the whole airframe shivered underfoot.

In the middle of all that, Locklear would let go of the struts and spread his arms wide. He hung by his knees from the landing gear and stood on the very top wing above the engine, effectively surfing the sky. He built an entire repertoire of these maneuvers and took it on the road when he left the Army.

What Was the Airplane-to-Airplane Transfer?

Locklear’s most famous innovation was the plane-change: transferring from one flying airplane to another in midair. It answered the same problem every barnstormer faced - once a crowd has seen a stunt, you need a bigger one.

Two Jennies flew in formation, one just above and ahead of the other. Locklear stood up on the top wing of the lower aircraft, reached up into the wind, and grabbed a rope ladder lowered from the airplane above. Then he stepped off one flying machine and climbed up into the other.

There was no net and no parachute. Two pilots had to hold formation in aircraft that resisted holding anything steady, in bumpy air, with a man’s life hanging on a rope strung between them. If the planes drifted apart or the ladder fouled a wire, he would fall.

How Famous Did Locklear Become?

Newspapers crowned Locklear the “King of the Wing Walkers.” He drew crowds of tens of thousands to small towns that didn’t have tens of thousands of residents - spectators traveled from three states away to watch him.

He was, plainly, one of the most famous men in America: a movie star before movie stars really existed. Naturally, Hollywood came calling.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

Hollywood signed Locklear to make flying pictures. In 1920, in California, he was filming a movie called The Skywayman. One night scene called for his airplane to plunge toward the ground in a spinning dive, lit by searchlights, with flare pots burning on the wings for the cameras.

The plan was routine for him: pull out of the dive low, as he had done a thousand times. According to the account that has come down to us, the searchlights were supposed to cut off as a signal telling him he was low enough to recover.

On that dive, the lights did not cut off. Locklear and his pilot rode the airplane all the way down into an oil sump on the studio back lot. He was 29 years old. The studio kept the footage and released it in theaters, letting audiences pay to watch the real death of America’s most famous flyer.

Why Barnstorming Still Matters

The barnstorming decade was the front porch of American aviation. The country’s first real introduction to flight didn’t happen in an airline terminal or on a jet bridge - it happened in a farmer’s field on a Sunday afternoon, for five dollars, courtesy of a grinning ex-Army pilot in goggles.

Every farmer who went up in a Jenny talked about it for the rest of their life. Every child who watched Locklear step between airplanes went home and dreamed. Some of those children grew up to build the airlines, fly the airmail through mountains at night, and design the machines that would cross oceans and reach the moon.

The barnstormers did more than fly airplanes - they sold America on the sky. They took a country that looked down at its own dirt and taught it to look up, and it never really looked back down.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear of Fort Worth, Texas, was the era’s most famous wing walker, nicknamed the “King of the Wing Walkers.”
• The Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”, a war-surplus Army trainer with a ~90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine, was the airplane that made barnstorming possible.
• Government surplus sales after World War I put brand-new Jennies on the market for just a few hundred dollars, fueling the barnstorming boom of the early 1920s.
• Locklear invented the midair plane-change, transferring between two formation-flying aircraft by rope ladder with no parachute or net.
• He died at age 29 in 1920 filming The Skywayman when signal searchlights failed to cue his recovery from a diving stunt.