Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Hollywood Floodlights That Killed Him Over an Oil Field in Nineteen Twenty

Ormer Locklear was the first person to transfer from one moving airplane to another, the first stunt pilot to star in a Hollywood feature film, and one of the defining figures of the barnstorming era. He died on August 2, 1920, when a spiral dive performed under Hollywood floodlights went unrecoverable - not from mechanical failure, but because powerful lights blinded him to his own horizon. He was 28 years old.

The Surplus That Started Everything

The Armistice of November 11, 1918 left the United States Army with roughly 11,000 trained pilots and thousands of surplus aircraft and nowhere to put either. The airplane at the center of what followed was the Curtiss JN-4 - universally known as the Jenny. Designed as a trainer before the war, she had a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine, cruised at around 70 miles per hour, and topped out near 75 on a good day. She leaked oil, handled sluggishly, and hated cold weather.

She was also available at auction for $200. New, the same airplane cost between five and six thousand dollars. A trained pilot with two hundred dollars could walk away from the Army owning an airplane outright.

Hundreds of them did exactly that.

What Barnstorming Actually Was

Those pilots loaded their Jennies and began moving across the countryside, landing in farmers’ fields and charging five dollars a ride to anyone willing to climb into the front seat. The word “barnstorming” predates aviation by about sixty years - it originally described theatrical troupes performing in rural barns when no proper theater was available. Pilots borrowed the term because what they were doing was essentially the same: load the show, find the next town, play to whoever shows up.

By 1919, hundreds of barnstormers were crisscrossing the country. The ones who lasted figured out something important early. Rides alone weren’t enough to grow a crowd. People would pay once to go up in an airplane. They’d pay again - and bring neighbors - to watch somebody do something impossible on top of one.

Who Ormer Locklear Was

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born on August 28, 1891, in Greenville, Texas, in Hunt County. Before the war he was a carpenter and construction worker, a man accustomed to spending his days thirty feet off the ground on scaffolding without giving it much thought. He enlisted in 1917, trained at Camp Dick in Dallas, and eventually became a flight instructor at Barron Field outside Fort Worth.

The story that defines him from that period involves a loose radiator cap. Rather than abort a training flight and lose his place in the schedule, Locklear handed the controls to his student, climbed out of the cockpit, shimmied forward along the fuselage, and tightened the cap with his bare hands at altitude. Then he climbed back in and finished the lesson.

Whether the radiator cap story gained some color in the retelling, it accurately captures the man. Locklear walked on wings the way other people walk across a porch - confident, unhurried, not particularly concerned about what could go wrong.

The First Airplane-to-Airplane Transfer

Word spread at Barron Field. And Locklear began thinking bigger.

On April 27, 1919, flying over Texas with his partner Milton “Skeets” Elliott piloting one Jenny and a pilot named Shirley Short flying a second, Locklear climbed out of his cockpit and transferred from one moving airplane to the other. Both aircraft in the air. No net. No rope between them. Just a man stepping from one plane to another at altitude.

Nobody had done it before. Nobody had seriously considered doing it.

Aviation newspapers ran headlines across the country. Locklear and his partners began touring with an aerial exhibition built around the transfer as the centerpiece - but carefully paced. A low pass first. Then a wing walk. Then a loop pulled out close to the ground. Then the transfer. Locklear understood showmanship the way a good storyteller understands pacing. He would stand on the wing and hold the moment - just looking at the crowd below - before he moved. Making them wait. Making them feel it.

That composure, more than the athleticism, was what separated him from imitators.

Hollywood and “The Great Air Robbery”

In 1919, Universal Pictures approached Locklear about starring in a feature film. “The Great Air Robbery” was a crime thriller built entirely around aerial stunts, and Locklear wasn’t doing stunt work for another actor - he was the star. The reason to buy the ticket.

The film packed movie houses. The reviews were strong. The box office was strong. Universal made money, and the industry learned something it hadn’t fully understood before: actual aircraft in actual danger doing actually impossible things was more compelling than anything a studio could fake on a backlot.

Fox Film Corporation came calling almost immediately.

“The Skywayman” and the Fatal Dive

Fox wanted a more ambitious production. More elaborate stunts. And footage nobody had ever gotten before - night flying. Aerial sequences shot after dark, with the aircraft illuminated by floodlights on the ground, the plane catching the light against a black sky. Something that had simply never appeared on film.

Production began in the summer of 1920 near an oil field on the southern edge of Los Angeles. Massive floodlights were positioned to beam upward and catch the aircraft as it descended.

On the night of August 2, 1920, Locklear climbed into his Jenny for a scene requiring a spiral dive - a controlled, spinning descent from altitude. Technically demanding but well within his capability. He had done hundreds of shows. He had stepped between moving aircraft at altitude. A spiral dive was a maneuver he had executed dozens of times.

What investigators and witnesses believed happened: when Locklear entered the dive and looked out of the open cockpit to orient himself for the recovery, the floodlights below were aimed directly at him. At night, descending in a tight spiral with powerful lights shining straight into his eyes, he lost his visual reference to the horizon. Without it, he could not judge when to begin pulling out.

The Jenny did not recover. At around 10:30 that evening, the aircraft struck the ground near an oil sump. Both Locklear and Elliott - his long-time partner, the man who had been flying the second airplane that first April day - were killed on impact.

“The Skywayman” was completed using footage already shot, including the final dive. It was released in October 1920, less than three months after the crash. Audiences who knew the story understood what they were watching in that last scene.

Why This Era Matters for Aviation

The barnstorming era didn’t end with Locklear. Through the early and mid-1920s, the exhibitions grew larger and more elaborate - flying circuses, aerial rodeos, wing walkers who developed real technical understanding of airstream, weight and balance, and angle of attack. Charles Lindbergh barnstormed before he crossed the Atlantic. Jimmy Doolittle did aerobatics at county fairs before he led the Tokyo raid.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 eventually brought federal licensing requirements and airworthiness standards, and the free-for-all began winding down. The Depression finished the job. By the early 1930s, the surplus Jennies were rotting in fields.

But in those eight or nine years between the Armistice and the Depression, the barnstormers accomplished something no government program could have managed: they put aviation in front of ordinary Americans. Farmers, schoolteachers, hardware store owners who had never had reason to look at the sky now looked up and decided that flying was worth caring about. Some historians estimate barnstormers carried close to a million passengers during that era. Some became pilots. Many more became the mechanics, engineers, controllers, and airport managers who built the system we fly in today.

There is a direct line from Ormer Locklear standing on a wing over a Texas pasture to every regional airport in this country with a flight school attached to it.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear, born 1891 in Greenville, Texas, became the world’s first professional wing walker and the first stunt pilot to star in a Hollywood feature film.
Surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennies sold for as little as $200 after WWI, enabling hundreds of veterans to barnstorm the country and introduce aviation to a generation of Americans.
Locklear performed the first airplane-to-airplane transfer in history on April 27, 1919, over Texas, with partners Elliott and Short.
He died August 2, 1920, during the filming of The Skywayman when Hollywood floodlights destroyed his visual horizon reference during a nighttime spiral dive.
The barnstorming era, from roughly 1918 to the mid-1920s, carried an estimated one million passengers and seeded the professional aviation workforce that built the modern air system.