Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Curtiss Jenny Stunt That Launched the Golden Age of Barnstorming

Ormer Locklear became the world’s first wing walker in 1919, climbing out of a Curtiss Jenny biplane mid-flight and standing upright on the top wing before stunned crowds across Texas. That single act launched the barnstorming era - a decade-long period that fundamentally shaped how ordinary Americans formed their relationship with aviation, producing many of the pilots who would go on to build the commercial airline industry.

The Surplus Aviation Crisis That Made Barnstorming Possible

The barnstorming era began with a glut. The U.S. Army had trained roughly 10,000 pilots during World War I and built thousands of aircraft to go with them. When the Armistice came in November 1918, both were suddenly surplus.

The government auctioned off Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes for $200–$300 each - approximately $4,000 in today’s money. Pilots who had spent two years mastering formation flying over the muddy fields of France and Texas came home to find their most hard-won skill had nearly no civilian market.

Some of them got creative.

What the Curtiss Jenny Actually Was

The JN-4 was never a great airplane. Its 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine was famously unreliable, burned oil at a rate that kept pilots nervous, and smelled constantly of castor oil and hot metal. The Jenny topped out around 75 mph and had a ceiling of roughly 6,000 feet on a good day.

But it flew. It was forgiving enough for students, it was cheap, and by 1919 thousands of them were sitting in fields and barns and makeshift airstrips across the country, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them.

Who Ormer Locklear Was

Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas, and grew up in Fort Worth. From childhood he simply was not afraid of heights - he climbed telephone poles, water towers, and buildings not out of recklessness but because height genuinely did not register as a threat the way it does for most people.

When the war came, he enlisted and trained at Kelly Field in San Antonio, where he proved to be an exceptionally skilled pilot with the stick-and-rudder feel that the best aviators always seem to have: an almost physical intuition for what the aircraft is doing and what it will tolerate.

How Wing Walking Was Invented

The origin story is almost too clean, but the evidence supports it.

Sometime in 1918, still during training at Kelly Field, Locklear was flying solo at around 1,000 feet when a fuel cap came loose. The cap was vibrating against the cowling and fuel was misting back toward the cockpit. Rather than land, he climbed out of the cockpit, crawled forward along the fuselage, tightened the cap, and climbed back in.

The Jenny kept flying. Nobody on the ground noticed.

What Locklear noticed was that it wasn’t as hard as it should have been. The slipstream was fierce and the noise was enormous, but the aircraft was stable enough that he could move around out there without losing control. He started practicing - after training flights, unofficially, with a trusted copilot at the controls - learning where to put his feet, how to use the struts and wires as handholds, how to read the aircraft’s pitch and roll and compensate for it with his body. He was inventing a discipline that did not yet exist.

The Act That Launched the Barnstorming Era

When the war ended, Locklear came home to Fort Worth at 27 years old with no civilian job prospects and one extraordinary skill nobody else on earth had. He partnered with pilots Skeets Elliott and Shirley Short and began putting on informal shows.

When Locklear climbed out on the wing in front of a crowd for the first time, the reaction was something none of them had fully anticipated. People were stunned.

In 1919, most Americans had never been within a hundred feet of an airplane. The aircraft was this extraordinary, slightly terrifying new thing that had changed a war and was supposed to change everything else - but most people were still experiencing it from the ground, looking up. And then a man was standing on the wing of one.

The crowds grew fast. Newspapers covered it. Farmers let them use fields in exchange for a ride. Locklear, Elliott, and Short moved across Texas and then north and east, following the county fair circuit. They charged a dollar a minute for rides - real money in 1919 - and still couldn’t keep up with demand.

The act expanded. Locklear added a mid-air aircraft-to-aircraft transfer, stepping from one wing to another with just 10–15 feet of separation between the planes. He added a rope ladder drop. He added a car-to-plane transfer, grabbing a low-flying Jenny’s landing gear from a speeding automobile and hauling himself up into the aircraft. Every stunt was built on precise coordination between pilots and Locklear’s complete physical comfort with being hundreds of feet in the air with nothing beneath him but open sky.

Hollywood Comes Calling

By late 1919, Universal Pictures was watching. The silent film era was hungry for aviation content - glamorous, dangerous, and impossible to fake convincingly in a studio. Universal approached Locklear about appearing in a motion picture called The Great Air Robbery, a crime drama that needed aerial sequences that would genuinely amaze audiences.

Locklear agreed, went to California, and the film was a hit. What he did in the air was even more spectacular on screen than in person, because cameras could get close in ways that a field crowd never could. Universal immediately greenlit a second film: The Skywayman.

The Skywayman called for a climactic nighttime dive - a spiraling plunge from altitude, filmed against the night sky with searchlights and floodlights illuminating the aircraft.

The Crash at Inglewood

On the night of August 2, 1920, Locklear and Elliott took off from the filming location at the Inglewood oil fields outside Los Angeles. The cameras were rolling. The floodlights were blazing. The scene called for a power dive from altitude, pulling out low over the ground for maximum dramatic effect.

What happened in the final seconds is not fully known. What witnesses and the film record suggest is that the floodlights - manageable during rehearsal - were blinding from the cockpit during the actual dive. Locklear, or Elliott, or both, likely lost visual reference with the ground. The pullout happened too late, or not at all.

The Jenny hit the ground at the bottom of the dive.

Ormer Locklear was 28 years old. Skeets Elliott was 26.

Universal released The Skywayman three months later anyway. The final dive is in the picture. The last footage ever shot of Ormer Locklear is the footage of the crash that killed him.

Why the Barnstorming Era Mattered to Aviation

What Locklear started in those Texas pastures in 1919 became something that shaped American aviation for decades.

The barnstorming era - running roughly from the Armistice through the early 1930s - was the period when ordinary Americans formed their relationship with flight. Before the airlines, before the airports, before commercial aviation became routine, the way most Americans ever got close to an airplane was because a barnstormer landed in a nearby field.

Picture a small town in Nebraska in 1922. The most exotic thing to ever arrive was the railroad. Then one afternoon an airplane lands in the Hendersons’ cornfield, and by evening half the county is standing there, and for a dollar a minute, you can go up.

Some went up once and never forgot it. Some went up and decided right then that this was what they wanted to do with their lives. Charles Lindbergh flew as a barnstormer before he flew the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart’s interest in aviation was solidified at an airshow in Long Beach in 1920. The pipeline from barnstorming crowds to the cockpits of the next generation ran direct.

What Ended the Barnstorming Era

The mechanics and pilots who kept Jennies running in the field developed a deep tradition of improvised solutions and creative problem-solving that survived in aviation culture for decades. The Curtiss OX-5 engine - that temperamental 90-horsepower powerplant - even has its own veterans’ organization that still meets today. Flying behind it taught pilots something no reliable engine could: that the machine was a tool, not a friend. You respected it, you maintained it, and you did not trust it completely.

What ended barnstorming, ultimately, was success. As more Americans flew, and as more barnstormers pushed their acts to increasingly dangerous extremes, fatality rates climbed. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 established federal oversight of civilian aviation for the first time - pilots had to be licensed, aircraft had to be certificated. The era of buying a Jenny, finding a field, and charging a dollar a minute was over.

Some barnstormers adapted and became the first commercial pilots, flying the new airmail routes. Some became flight instructors. A few founded airlines. Others simply drifted away from flying when the rules arrived - they’d learned to fly in a world where you took off without asking permission and landed wherever you felt like it, and regulated aviation wasn’t what they’d signed up for.

Locklear didn’t live to see any of it. He exists permanently in that particular moment of American aviation - standing upright on the top wing of a Jenny, arms spread wide, the whole sky behind him and the whole country looking up.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1918–1919 while training at Kelly Field, after improvising a mid-flight cockpit exit to tighten a loose fuel cap.
• Surplus Curtiss Jenny biplanes selling for $200–$300 created the conditions for barnstorming; thousands of trained pilots had skills and cheap aircraft with no civilian market.
• Locklear’s aerial stunts - including mid-air aircraft transfers and car-to-plane grabs - drew enormous crowds and launched the barnstorming era that ran through the early 1930s.
• Hollywood recognized the spectacle: Locklear appeared in Universal Pictures’ The Great Air Robbery (1919) and The Skywayman, dying in a filming accident on August 2, 1920, at age 28.
• The barnstorming era created aviation’s first mass audience and directly shaped future pilots including Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart; it ended when the Air Commerce Act of 1926 established federal licensing and aircraft certification.