Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Hollywood Film That Screened His Fatal Dive

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1917, turned it into a national sensation, and was killed during a filmed night dive on August 2, 1920, when the klieg lights that were supposed to guide his pullout never cut. The footage of his fatal spin made it into the completed film, The Skywayman, which screened that September. He was 28 years old.

Who Was Ormer Locklear Before He Could Fly?

Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas - a small-town carpenter with sharp mechanical instincts. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he enlisted in the Army Air Service and trained on the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the canvas-and-spruce biplane that defined a generation of American aviators. He was assigned to a training base near Fort Worth, Texas.

The Jenny demanded real attention. Its 90-horsepower OX-5 engine ran on castor oil, the cockpit was open to the sky, and the controls were heavy enough to make pilots feel every gust through the stick. Pilots who trained on it came away understanding what it actually meant to fly an airplane.

Locklear was a natural. He was also restless.

How Wing Walking Was Actually Invented

The origin wasn’t a performance - it was a problem. On a training flight, Locklear’s Jenny developed a loose fitting forward of the cockpit. The engine was still running. The airplane was still flying. The fix was right there, just out of reach.

So he climbed out.

At altitude. In flight. On a biplane doing 60 to 70 miles per hour.

He braced against the slipstream, fixed the fitting, and climbed back in. His commanding officer was furious. But Locklear had discovered something: a calm, careful, unafraid person could survive outside the cockpit at altitude. He started doing it deliberately - walking the lower wing, hanging from the landing gear, standing on the fuselage with arms out while the slipstream tried to pull him loose.

He wasn’t just experimenting. He was studying. He figured out where to place his hands and feet, how to shift weight against airflow, how to read turbulence coming off the fuselage. He turned what looked like a death wish into a repeatable, teachable skill.

The Barnstorming Economy: Selling the Sky

After the armistice in November 1918, the U.S. government had roughly 10,000 surplus aircraft to dispose of - mostly Jennies. A plane that had cost $5,000 to build could be purchased for $300 or less. One pilot famously bought a surplus Jenny for $50.

Thousands of pilots who had just spent two years learning to fly had no intention of stopping. They took their planes to county fairs, open fields, and small towns across rural America. For $1 or $2, a passenger could see their farm from above for the first time in their life, look down at the roof of the house where they were born, and come back down with white knuckles and a story.

Locklear teamed with pilot William “Skeets” Elliott and then added Milton “Miff” Elliott (no relation). Together they built an act unlike anything audiences had seen: midair plane-to-plane transfers, inverted hangs from the landing gear, walks from cockpit to wingtip and back. Crowds drove 50 miles in wagons and early motorcars. Women fainted. Men stood open-mouthed.

Locklear understood something precise about crowd psychology: audiences didn’t just want to watch someone do something dangerous. They wanted to watch someone who might die - and then choose not to. That was the act. The absolute edge of human experience, followed by the relief of survival. He was very, very good at delivering both.

Hollywood Calls: The Great Air Robbery

By 1919, Locklear had a national reputation. Universal Pictures signed him to produce The Great Air Robbery, a silent film built entirely around real aerial stunts - plane-to-plane transfers, wing walking filmed from a chase aircraft in close formation, low-level dives with the camera catching the Jenny’s shadow crossing faces below.

The film was a sensation. People who had never been within ten miles of an airfield watched Locklear defy gravity in dark theaters across the country.

Universal immediately commissioned a second picture: The Skywayman.

The Night Dive: What Went Wrong on August 2, 1920

For the climax of The Skywayman, the production planned a night sequence at an oil field west of Los Angeles. Locklear would spin down out of a dark sky, illuminated from below by klieg lights, and pull out just above the field. Director William Worne planned to cut the lights at a specified altitude during the dive - giving Locklear a dark horizon to orient against before recovery.

Locklear’s concern was specific and well-founded: without visual reference, he would be flying blind inside a spin, at night, in a biplane, with an unknown distance to the ground.

Worne told him the cue would work.

On the night of August 2, 1920, roughly 2,000 people gathered near the oil field. Locklear and Miff Elliott took off into the summer night, made several passes for the cameras, and then Locklear climbed to approximately 3,000 feet and rolled into the spin.

The lights did not go out.

Whether it was miscommunication, hesitation, or a mechanical failure with the light rigs, no account has ever settled definitively. What every account agrees on: the klieg lights blazed straight into Locklear’s eyes as he spun. He could find no horizon, no reference point in three-dimensional space - only white light. He was too low when he attempted to recover.

The Jenny struck the earth near an oil sump and disintegrated. Ormer Locklear and Miff Elliott were killed on impact.

The Footage That Ran Anyway

The cameras had been rolling. The footage of Locklear’s final dive was included in the completed film.

The Skywayman was released in September 1920. Audiences across the country watched what they believed was a completed stunt. Some theaters reportedly posted notices before the final reel explaining what the audience was about to see. Others did not. Universal dedicated the film to Locklear and Elliott. The footage ran either way.

Why This Matters for Pilots: The Regulation That Followed

The barnstorming era was killing pilots at a rate that would be difficult to comprehend today. Surplus aircraft, minimal maintenance, no airworthiness standards, no weather services, no training requirements, no oversight. Just pilots and gravity and physics, which don’t bend for nerve or reputation.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 was the direct legislative response to what was happening in those unregulated skies. It established pilot certificates, aircraft airworthiness standards, and designated airways - the structural foundation of the aviation system that exists today. The Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce, which eventually became the Civil Aeronautics Authority and then the FAA, came into being largely because of what the barnstorming years proved at fatal cost.

Every checkride, every preflight, every weather briefing, every regulation that feels like paperwork until the day it doesn’t - those exist downstream of what the barnstorming era demonstrated in blood.

Locklear himself never asked for those rules. He believed in skill and nerve and careful preparation. What he couldn’t account for was the one variable he had handed to someone else: a director’s hand on a light switch.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1917 when he climbed out of a flying Jenny to fix a loose fitting - and then began doing it deliberately, studying it as a learnable skill.
The post-WWI surplus aircraft market flooded America with cheap planes and trained pilots, creating the barnstorming era; a surplus Jenny could sell for as little as $50.
Locklear became the first aviation film star, headlining Universal Pictures’ The Great Air Robbery (1919) before beginning The Skywayman.
He died on August 2, 1920, during a filmed night dive when the director’s promised light cue - intended to give Locklear a visual horizon for pullout - never came.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 established the foundational structure of FAA regulation, driven in large part by the casualty rate of the unregulated barnstorming years Locklear helped define.

Sources: Aviation historian Don Dwiggins; records from the National Air and Space Museum.