Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Hollywood Floodlights That Ended the Man Who Made It Famous

Ormer Locklear didn’t invent wing walking for the crowd. He invented it because a gas cap came loose over Texas and he was the closest one to the problem. What followed was one of the most spectacular careers in early American aviation - and one of its most preventable deaths, on a grass airfield in the San Fernando Valley on a warm August night in 1920.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in Greenville, Texas, in October 1891. He grew up with an instinctive comfort around engines and machinery that made him a natural candidate for the Army Air Service when the United States entered World War I. He earned his wings, reported to Barron Field near Fort Worth, and went to work training other pilots.

The aircraft he instructed on was the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the Jenny. A tandem two-seat biplane, the Jenny carried a water-cooled OX-5 engine producing roughly 90 horsepower - enough to lift two people off the ground with little to spare. It was slow, honest, and forgiving. It was also the backbone of American military pilot training during the war.

How Did Wing Walking Actually Start?

Sometime in 1917 or early 1918, Locklear’s radiator gas cap worked loose in flight. On a Jenny with an OX-5, an overheating engine was not a minor inconvenience. It was the kind of emergency that ended with a forced landing in whatever flat field you could find.

Locklear didn’t look for a field. He climbed out of the cockpit.

At roughly 70 miles per hour, the slipstream hits an exposed body like a wall. Locklear worked forward along the fuselage, reached the radiator, and tightened the cap by hand while Texas moved underneath him. His instructor was furious. His fellow trainees were astonished. And then someone asked him to do it again.

Wing walking began not as theater, but as maintenance.

Locklear discovered two things in that moment: he had an extraordinary sense of balance and a near-total absence of the fear response that keeps most people inside the cockpit, and anyone who watched him couldn’t look away. He kept going. He studied the aerodynamics. He worked out what was possible on the outside of a moving biplane - standing on the upper wing, hanging from the interplane struts, moving from cockpit to nose and back while the aircraft held altitude beneath him.

The Army disapproved but couldn’t dismiss him as reckless. He had thought through the weight and balance consequences - the center-of-gravity shifts, the aerodynamic effects of 170 pounds of human in places the airframe was never designed to carry. This wasn’t someone ignoring risk. It was someone who had calculated it and decided it was acceptable. That is a specific kind of courage, and it is hard to argue with.

What Was the Barnstorming Era?

The war ended in November 1918. The Army held an enormous surplus of Curtiss Jennies and a large population of trained pilots with no immediate place to fly. The government auctioned the aircraft off. Jennies sold for $300 or less - cheaper than a good car. Trained pilots bought them by the hundreds, flew them out of military fields, and fanned across the country looking for ways to earn a living in the air.

There was no formal circuit, no booking agent, no schedule. A pilot landed in a farmer’s field or at a county fairground, drove into town, and put up hand-lettered signs. Airplane rides. A dollar for ten minutes. In parts of rural America, people had read about airplanes but never seen one. The crowd that showed up wasn’t paying for transportation. They were paying for wonder.

The rides were the bread and butter. But rides only drew a crowd if something first made people stop and look up. That’s where aerobatics came in - loops, snap rolls, inverted low passes, spot landing contests. Anything that would make a person put down whatever they were doing and stand in a field with their mouth open.

The Act That Made Locklear Famous

Locklear formed a troupe after the war built around one central element no other barnstormer had: the airplane-to-airplane transfer.

Two Jennies flew in tight formation, wings nearly touching. Locklear would climb out of one aircraft in flight, work across to the second airplane, and climb in. The crowd below could see the gap between the aircraft. They could see him release one airplane and reach for the other, with nothing between him and the ground but air.

The pilot holding formation for this was Skeets Elliott - full name Milton Elliott - and the trust that flying required was not small. Elliott held his wingtip inside the other aircraft’s envelope with precise lateral and vertical control while Locklear used his wing struts as handholds. Any deviation at the wrong moment was not a near miss. It was a collision.

They practiced until it was right. Then they took it in front of crowds. Newspaper accounts describe the noise from those crowds as the sound of people who genuinely could not believe what they were watching. The Chicago Tribune covered Locklear. The Los Angeles Times ran feature stories. By 1919, he was nationally known - and the people who made movies in Los Angeles were paying close attention.

Locklear’s Hollywood Films

Universal Pictures signed Locklear to star in The Great Air Robbery (1919). The pitch was simple: nothing on screen was fake. No trick photography, no stunt double. Ormer Locklear actually doing what you were watching, in a real aircraft, at real altitude, on real film.

The picture was a genuine hit. Audiences in 1919 had no frame of reference for aerial footage like that, because footage like that had never existed. The physics were obviously real - the man was on top of the airplane, the airplane was moving, and the ground was a long way down. There was no other explanation.

Fox Film Corporation moved quickly, signing Locklear for a second picture: The Skywayman (1920). More ambitious, more spectacular, and carrying the same fundamental promise. This is real. Nobody is pretending.

Production began in the spring of 1920.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

The climactic sequence of The Skywayman called for a deliberate flat spin - the aircraft entering a tight corkscrew spiral from altitude and pulling out at the last possible moment for the camera. The drama was obvious. So was the danger. A flat spin in a Jenny at that altitude, held to the last second, leaves no margin for confusion.

The production team wanted to shoot at night. Night footage would be dramatic: the aircraft silhouetted against dark sky, strong visual contrast on film.

To light the scene, they positioned industrial arc lights around the perimeter of DeMille Field Number Two in the San Fernando Valley, aimed upward, creating a bright ring of artificial light at ground level.

What they hadn’t fully accounted for was what those lights would do to a pilot trying to judge altitude during a spiral descent at night.

In darkness, you judge altitude by the relationship between your position and the ground below - illuminated objects, surface texture, the horizon. When the ground is ringed by blazing arc lights and everything beyond them is dark, your visual system gravitates toward the brightness and treats it as the reference point. A ring of lights at ground level becomes your frame, not the actual surface of the earth. You can be lower than you think you are. You can run out of altitude before your instruments, your instincts, or your eyes tell you.

Locklear entered the spin. Skeets Elliott was airborne as well, participating in the same sequence.

Neither man survived.

The investigation found no mechanical failure. Both aircraft had been airworthy. The engines had been running. Witness accounts and the physics of the situation pointed to spatial disorientation - the arc lights had stripped away the visual references Locklear had relied on across a thousand previous performances. In the final seconds of the spiral, with Hollywood’s floodlights blazing from below, he misjudged. The ground was closer than it appeared.

He was 28 years old.

The particular danger of that setup - the way arc lights at ground level interact with a pilot’s visual system during a nighttime spin - was not something Locklear had encountered before. He was a calculating man, not a careless one. But aviation kills you with the new thing. The variable you hadn’t yet tested. That lesson did not originate with Locklear, and it did not end with him.

What Did Locklear Leave Behind?

Wing walking didn’t die with its inventor. It expanded. The loosely affiliated group known as the Thirteen Black Cats was performing airplane-to-automobile transfers, mid-air parachute switches, and low-altitude wing walks through the early and mid-1920s. The act Locklear built remained one of the most reliable draws in American popular entertainment for years after the crash at DeMille Field.

The barnstorming era itself ran until the mid-1920s. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 brought federal regulation to what had been essentially ungoverned airspace - licensing, airworthiness certificates, designated airways. The wild years were over.

But those years had done something lasting. They had taken aviation out of the hands of the military and wealthy experimenters and put it in front of ordinary Americans. The people who stood in farm fields and fairgrounds watching a Jenny do loops overhead, watching Locklear walk out on a wing at altitude - they went home changed. They had seen what was possible. Some of their children became pilots.

The barnstormers were salesmen for the idea of flight itself, and they were extraordinarily effective at the job. When you watch a formation team work an airshow crowd today, or an aerobatic pilot do something in the vertical that shouldn’t be physically possible, you’re watching a line that runs straight back through the barnstorming fields of the 1920s - back to a Curtiss Jenny over Texas, and a man who climbed out of a cockpit to fix a gas cap because there was a problem and he was the closest one to it.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1917–1918 as an improvised in-flight maintenance solution, not as a performance act
• The postwar availability of $300 Curtiss Jennies launched the barnstorming era, putting aviation in front of ordinary Americans for the first time
• Locklear’s airplane-to-airplane transfers with partner Skeets Elliott became the centerpiece of the barnstorming act and made him a national celebrity
• His death in August 1920 during filming of The Skywayman was caused by spatial disorientation - Hollywood arc lights at ground level destroyed his altitude references during a nighttime spin
• The Air Commerce Act of 1926 ended the barnstorming era by introducing federal licensing and airworthiness requirements to American aviation