Ormer Locklear, the First Man to Walk on Wings, and the Hollywood Night Flight That Ended the Most Dangerous Career in American Aviation

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking from a loose radiator cap in 1918, and within two years had become the most famous aviator in the United States. He made two Hollywood films, performed before crowds in the tens of thousands, and died on camera during a night filming sequence on August 2, 1920. He was 28 years old.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Born in 1891 in Eastland, Texas, Locklear was a mechanic before he was a pilot. Not from a privileged background, he understood engines and mechanical systems at a fundamental level - and that understanding would define everything that made his aerial work distinctive. The Army Air Service assigned him as a flight instructor at Barron Field, south of Fort Worth, where he flew the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny”: a fabric-and-spruce training aircraft powered by a 100-horsepower OX-5 engine that had strong opinions about whether it wanted to run on any given day.

He was good at flying. More specifically, he was good at understanding what an airplane was doing and why - and at pushing that understanding to its absolute limits.

How Wing Walking Was Invented

The origin story involves a loose radiator cap. Sometime in late 1918 or early 1919, the cap on Locklear’s Jenny worked loose during a flight. Rather than land to fix it, he throttled back, trimmed the aircraft for level flight, and climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing.

What that required was not just nerve. It required an instinctive grasp of where the lift was, where the drag was, and how the aircraft would respond to a shift in weight distribution. No manual existed for this. Locklear worked it out with his body in the slipstream.

Then he started thinking about what else he could do out there.

From Training Field to Air Show Circuit

Locklear recruited other young Army pilots at Barron Field - men who were bored between instructing duties and willing to try something dangerous. Together they developed plane-to-plane transfers: two Jennys flying in tight formation, roughly ten to fifteen feet apart, while a man stepped off the wing of one aircraft and grabbed the landing gear of the other.

The Army disapproved. The disapproval was noted and ignored.

When the war ended in November 1918, Locklear had a skill set with no military application and a very obvious civilian one. The Army Air Service demobilization flooded the open market with 6,000 to 10,000 surplus aircraft almost overnight. Curtiss Jennys sold for as little as $300 apiece - roughly the price of a secondhand automobile. Thousands of trained pilots had no airline to fly for, no mail contract to chase. They took their Jennys and went looking for crowds.

That is how the barnstorming era begins. Not with a business plan, but with surplus and restlessness.

Locklear and Skeets Elliott

Locklear was not a barnstormer in the traditional sense - he wasn’t selling two-dollar rides out of farm fields. He was already operating at a different scale. With his partner Milton “Skeets” Elliott, a small, quick man well-suited to the physical demands of in-flight transfers, Locklear built a touring exhibition act.

The program included standard aerobatics - loops, rolls, inverted passes - and then the acts Locklear had developed at Barron Field. Plane-to-plane transfers. Hanging from the landing gear by both hands, then one. Standing on top of the upper wing at 3,000 feet while the pilot below executed a slow roll. These stunts had no technical names because no one had performed them before.

Post-war America was hungry for spectacle and heroes. Locklear supplied both.

Hollywood Comes Calling: The Great Air Robbery

Universal Pictures signed Locklear and Skeets Elliott in 1919 to make a serial called The Great Air Robbery. The silent film era had discovered aviation pictures sold tickets, but the cameras of the era were good enough to expose fake aerial work - and enough Americans had seen real exhibitions to spot the difference. Studios needed pilots who could actually perform.

The Great Air Robbery was a national sensation. Locklear played a federal agent; the plot was thin, the flying was real. Actual aircraft, actual transfers, cameras mounted on chase planes to capture it. His face appeared in newspapers coast to coast. He was mobbed at personal appearances. For a moment, he was the most glamorous person in the country.

The Skywayman and the Decision That Killed Him

Fox Film Corporation then contracted Locklear for a second picture: The Skywayman. The production was more ambitious than its predecessor, and it was going to end with a night sequence - a climactic aerial scene filmed after dark, with searchlights illuminating the aircraft for the cameras.

Night flying in 1920 was not a casual undertaking. There were no meaningful instrument panels, no approach lights, no runway lighting. Without a visible horizon, an open-cockpit biplane pilot had almost nothing to work with. The horizon is the primary reference for aircraft attitude - lose it, and the vestibular system begins generating sensations that have nothing to do with what the aircraft is actually doing.

Locklear said yes. He had built his entire career on saying yes to things that looked unsurvivable.

August 2, 1920: Curtiss Field

On the night of August 2, 1920, at Curtiss Field on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Locklear and Skeets Elliott took off in their Jenny as darkness fell over the California hills. The film crew was set. The searchlights were live. A crowd had gathered.

The prevailing theory is that the searchlights blinded him. Eyes adapted to darkness require more than twenty minutes to reach full night vision sensitivity. A direct searchlight hit destroys that adaptation instantly. In an open-cockpit aircraft at low altitude, the time needed to readjust is longer than the time available.

Some accounts add an engine failure. Some cite a control problem. Some attribute it simply to the loss of visual reference - the horizon gone, the instruments inadequate, the ground approaching faster than any human reaction time could address.

The Jenny entered a spin. A tight, descending spiral. It did not recover.

Ormer Locklear was 28 years old. Skeets Elliott was 24.

What Fox Did With the Footage

The cameras captured everything. Fox Film Corporation debated whether to include the crash sequence in the final cut. They included it. The Skywayman was released in October 1920 with the actual crash footage intact. Audiences watched the man die. The film was a considerable commercial success.

That fact is worth sitting with.

Why Locklear’s Story Still Matters

The barnstorming era did not end with Ormer Locklear. Wing walkers kept walking. Flying circuses kept booking county fairs. The era ran another decade before it faded.

But something shifted after his death. The exhibition flying industry began to reckon with the fact that fatalities were bad for business as well as for the performers. A slow, imperfect movement toward professionalism began - toward the structured airshow culture that exists today, with its safety waivers, flight lines, and FAA oversight.

Locklear was perfectly matched to a single moment: the brief window when everything about flight was still new enough that recklessness read as genius. The entire lineage of aerobatic performance, the airshow tradition, the stunt pilot profession - it all traces back to a man who climbed out of a cockpit over Texas because he did not want to land. The gap between courage and recklessness is not always visible from the inside.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear invented wing walking and plane-to-plane transfers at Barron Field, Texas, around 1918–1919, working entirely from instinct - no precedent, no manual.
• The post-WWI demobilization released up to 10,000 surplus Curtiss Jennys at roughly $300 each, directly enabling the barnstorming era.
• Locklear starred in two Hollywood films - The Great Air Robbery (Universal, 1919) and The Skywayman (Fox, 1920) - becoming the most famous aviator in the country.
• He died on August 2, 1920, almost certainly due to searchlight-induced blindness destroying his dark adaptation at low altitude over Curtiss Field, Los Angeles.
• Fox Film Corporation released The Skywayman with the actual crash footage intact in October 1920; the film was a commercial success, reflecting the complicated relationship between aviation spectacle and public appetite for risk.