Ormer Locklear, the First Man to Walk on Wings, and the Hollywood Floodlights That Killed Him

Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in the summer of 1918 when he climbed out of a moving Curtiss JN-4 at altitude to tighten a loose radiator cap - engine running, slipstream trying to rip him off the fuselage. By 1920, he was dead at 28, killed by Hollywood floodlights that blinded him during a night dive on a film set outside Los Angeles. In the two years between, he became the most famous aviator in America and helped sell an entire nation on the idea that flight was real, accessible, and worth caring about.

How Wing-Walking Was Born

Locklear was 26 years old, a carpenter from Greenville, Texas, when the Army assigned him as a flight instructor at Camp Taliaferro in Fort Worth. He’d learned quickly enough to stay on staff. During a training flight, the radiator cap on his Jenny began working loose and engine temperature started climbing.

He climbed out of the cockpit at altitude and worked forward along the nose to tighten it. The pilots watching from the ground couldn’t believe what they’d seen. Locklear could. He kept experimenting. By the time the armistice came in November 1918, he had grown comfortable moving around a flying airplane in a way most people would have called reckless.

The World the Barnstormers Inherited

The end of World War I left the Army with tens of thousands of trained pilots and a fleet of surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennies with no military purpose. The government auctioned them off. Some sold for $200. Some for $300 to $500 - machines the Army had spent thousands to build.

Veterans with flying skills and cheap airplanes found themselves in an economy with few opportunities. They loaded their Jennies onto flatcars, rode the rails to the next town, and put on a show.

The word barnstormer comes from exactly this: pilots flying into towns with no airport, no advance notice, spotting a flat field and landing in it. Within an hour, half the county would know there was an airplane. For $1 to $5, you could go up. For three to five minutes, the earth fell away.

In 1919, that was something most rural Americans had never experienced. No movies. No highways. The most exciting event most people had seen was a county fair. A biplane buzzing the church steeple - low, loud, trailing the smell of castor oil and hot metal - was in a category of its own.

What Made Locklear Different

After mustering out, Locklear teamed up with two other veterans, Skeets Elliott and Shirley Short, and built an act. What he did in that act had no precedent.

He walked out to the wingtip of a flying Jenny - sixty miles an hour, crowd frozen below - and stood there hands-free. He hung by his legs from the landing gear axle, arms loose, face pointed straight down at the earth. Then he moved into mid-air transfers: two Jennies in close formation, Locklear walking to the wingtip of one and climbing across to the other while both aircraft flew.

Locklear wasn’t fearless. He said so himself. His stated philosophy was that he was more afraid of boring the crowd than of falling. Hesitation showed. The barnstorming economy ran on reputation, and reputation lived or died on the last stunt.

The Curtiss JN-4: The Right Machine at the Right Moment

The Curtiss JN-4 was an unlikely vehicle for spectacle, and that’s exactly why it worked. The OX-5 engine - a water-cooled V-8 making roughly 90 horsepower - was slow by design. The Jenny cruised at speeds that gave crowds time to watch and gave wing-walkers time to move.

The airframe was braced with wires and struts in every direction: handholds everywhere, footholds everywhere. The open cockpit offered no protection and no isolation from the air. By modern standards, the Jenny was barely flying. By the standards of 1919, it was sufficient.

Charles Lindbergh was 17 years old in 1919. Jimmy Doolittle was barely out of training. The public face of American aviation was Ormer Locklear.

Hollywood Came Calling

Universal Pictures built a feature film around his act. The Great Air Robbery opened in 1919 and was a hit. The stunts in it are real - no wire rigs, no effects, no safety net. Universal got rich. Locklear got famous. Production began immediately on a second film: The Skywayman.

The Night the Floodlights Killed Him

August 2, 1920. DeMille Field Number Two, near Los Angeles. The film crew had rigged large arc floodlights aimed straight up into the night sky. Locklear’s assignment was a spinning nose dive - corkscrewing down out of the dark, pulling out just above the ground.

He had done controlled dives before. He knew the altitudes, knew the sight picture required to pull out in time. What he hadn’t accounted for was what those lights would do when they hit him from below in a dark cockpit.

He went up. He set up for the dive. He came down.

The floodlights blinded him.

Accounts from the time differ on contributing factors - some sources noted that Locklear and Skeets Elliott, his co-pilot that night, may have been drinking. The investigation that followed was not thorough by any modern standard. The result was not in dispute. Ormer Locklear did not pull out of the dive. Both men died on that field. The cameras were still running. Universal possessed footage of the crash. They never released it.

Locklear was 28 years old.

Why This Matters for Aviation

The funeral in Fort Worth drew an estimated 50,000 people in the August heat. Aviation had its first genuine celebrity martyr.

The barnstorming circuit did not slow down after his death. It accelerated. The pilots who came up watching Locklear had seen the proof: crowds would pay, aviation was entertainment, and the sky was a stage. Aerial circuses toured the country with wing-walkers, parachutists, mock dogfights, and passenger rides. The names and acts multiplied.

What the barnstormers built, collectively, was public belief in aviation - something manufacturers, engineers, and the military had not managed to build in two decades. Every airline passenger in the 1930s, every child who grew up wanting to fly, every small-town airport that got paved because a county commission finally decided it mattered - there is a line connecting all of it back to a Jenny in a pasture.

The chaos also forced a regulatory response. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 was Congress acknowledging that the sky needed rules. It established the first real system for certifying pilots and aircraft for airworthiness. It is the foundation the Federal Aviation Administration was eventually built on. That framework exists in part because a few hundred veterans with surplus biplanes made the situation too wild to leave unaddressed.

The Great Air Robbery has been preserved and can still be watched. The stunts hold up. That is a man - not a stunt double, not a composite - climbing between two airplanes in flight because a crowd is watching below.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1918 at Camp Taliaferro, Fort Worth, as an improvised mechanical fix - not a planned stunt.
Surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennies selling for as little as $200 after WWI created the conditions for the barnstorming era.
Locklear became the most famous aviator in America by 1919, years before Lindbergh or Doolittle were household names.
He died on August 2, 1920, blinded by Hollywood arc lights during a nighttime film stunt at age 28.
The barnstorming movement he helped lead directly shaped public support for aviation and contributed to the regulatory framework codified in the Air Commerce Act of 1926.