Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Hollywood Night Dive That Ended the Most Dangerous Career in Early Aviation

In 1919, a 28-year-old mechanic from Greenville, Texas named Ormer Leslie Locklear became the most famous aviator in America - not by setting speed records or crossing oceans, but by climbing out of the cockpit of a flying biplane and walking on the wing. His career lasted two years. His influence on aviation lasted a century.

How the Barnstorming Era Was Born

The barnstorming era grew directly out of the end of World War I. The Army Air Service had trained approximately 15,000 pilots during the war. When the armistice came in November 1918, those men returned home with skills and nerve - and no civilian aviation industry to absorb either.

At the same time, the government held thousands of surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies” - the standard training aircraft of the war. After demobilization, they sold them off at fire-sale prices. A flyable Jenny could be purchased for $200, sometimes less.

Pilots bought the cheap airplanes and went looking for crowds. The barnstorming circuit grew without organization or oversight: pilots landing in farmers’ fields, charging a dollar a ride, performing loops and spins over fence lines. The term came from theatrical touring, where performers traveled rural areas and played barns and outdoor venues that city theaters never reached. The barnstorming aviators were doing the same thing overhead.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born on October 28, 1891, in Greenville, Texas. He was a carpenter and mechanic - a man comfortable at height, comfortable with his hands, and comfortable doing things that made others nervous to watch.

He enlisted in the Army Air Service in 1917 and trained at fields outside Fort Worth. The airplane he trained on, the Jenny, was mechanically unreliable by any modern standard. Carburetors flooded in climbing turns. Fuel lines vibrated loose. Radiator caps shed in flight.

Locklear’s response to these problems was direct: he climbed out and fixed them. Not after landing. Mid-flight. On the wing. Not because there was a procedure for it, but because he was a mechanic and the machine needed fixing.

His instructors were caught somewhere between court-martial and standing ovation every time he did it.

What Made Wing Walking Possible

What Locklear was developing - without anyone using this language at the time - was a deep physical understanding of how a biplane wing behaves in flight. He learned where to put his feet. He understood the airflow. He figured out how to shift his body weight without upsetting the aircraft’s balance.

None of this was solo work. Wing walking at Locklear’s level required a pilot who understood exactly what the man on the wing needed. Too sharp a bank and Locklear could lose his footing. Too fast a climb and the airflow could take him off the wing entirely.

That pilot was Milton “Skeets” Elliott. The partnership between Locklear and Elliott was the invisible foundation of everything that followed. Skeets could manage an airplane with Locklear standing on the upper wing in a headwind and make it look smooth.

Locklear’s Acts and Rise to Fame

Their first public performances in 1919 drew the crowds that barnstorming always drew: farmers, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, and veterans. Locklear would climb out of the front cockpit while Elliott flew, walk to the wingtip of the lower wing, spread his arms wide, and wave at the crowd.

He developed new acts. A rope ladder would dangle from the Jenny while a speeding automobile drove below on a dirt road, and Locklear would climb down and grab the ladder, swinging up from the car into the sky. He transferred between two aircraft in flight - stepping from the wing of one biplane to another while both flew in formation.

The newspapers ran out of ordinary words. They called him “the Human Fly” and “the Man Who Mocks Death.” His face appeared on front pages from Dallas to New York.

By mid-1919, Locklear was likely the most famous aviator in America - more recognizable to the general public than Orville Wright, who was alive and keeping a quiet life in Ohio, or Eddie Rickenbacker, the war’s leading American ace.

How Hollywood Came Calling

Universal Pictures understood what they had when they saw Locklear perform. This was the era of silent film - no computer effects, no green screen. If a movie needed a man on the wing of an airplane, they needed an actual man willing to climb onto the wing of an actual airplane, with a camera crew brave enough to fly alongside and get the shot.

Universal signed Locklear to “The Great Air Robbery” in 1919. He played a heroic aviator who foils a mail theft operation. The film’s stunts were captured from angles that barn-field crowds had never seen - cameras flying alongside him, placing the audience in the sky with him. The picture was a genuine commercial success.

Universal immediately put Locklear into a second film: “The Skywayman.” It was now 1920. Locklear was 28 years old, at the absolute top of his career, with money for the first time in his life, a fiancée, and what appeared to be an unlimited future.

The Night Dive That Ended Everything

The climax of The Skywayman was a night sequence: a spiral dive filmed at an oil field in Alhambra, just east of Los Angeles. Locklear and Elliott would take the Jenny up in the dark with flares attached to the wingtips and spiral down in a blaze of light while cameras rolled below.

Nobody fully thought through what the flares would do.

When you attach bright burning flares to the wingtips of your own aircraft and fly at night, those flares sit directly in your peripheral vision. They eliminate your ability to judge where the ground is. You have replaced the subtle darkness that gives your eyes altitude reference points with a brilliant cone of light that provides no useful information about your proximity to the ground. In 1920, the technique of flying without outside visual reference was not yet systematically understood, let alone taught.

On August 2, 1920, the cameras were loaded, the crew was in position, and Locklear and Elliott took the Jenny aloft into the warm Southern California dark. Elliott began the spiral dive. The flares burned white against the California night.

The Jenny did not pull out of the dive.

Both Ormer Locklear and Skeets Elliott were killed on impact. Locklear was 28 years old. The cameras captured some of what happened. The footage was never used.

The Skywayman was released weeks later with a reworked ending. Locklear’s funeral in Los Angeles drew thousands. His body was taken home to Fort Worth, where thousands more came to pay their respects.

The Barnstorming Era After Locklear

The circuit continued. Wing walking became a fixture of the airshow world through the 1920s. Aerobatic pilots refined the maneuvers Locklear had pioneered. Women entered the circuit and performed the same stunts under the same conditions - a fact the press found doubly astonishing and, for the promoters, doubly profitable.

The era wound down in the late 1920s for several converging reasons. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 brought federal oversight to civilian aviation for the first time, making casual airshow operations harder to sustain without proper licensing and insurance. The cheap surplus Jennies wore out. Newer aircraft cost more. The economics that had made barnstorming possible in 1919 had fundamentally shifted by 1927.

Why Locklear’s Story Still Matters to Aviation

The barnstorming crowds of the early 1920s were often watching their first airplane. Not reading about one. Not seeing a photograph. Actually watching a machine fly overhead with a human being performing on its outside. For enormous numbers of Americans - especially in rural areas far from cities - the barnstormer was aviation. He was the first evidence that flying was something real. Something a person could actually do.

Every kid who stood in a county fairground watching a wing walker went home changed. Some became pilots. Some became engineers. Some built the airports, the aircraft factories, and the airlines that defined the second half of the twentieth century. The barnstorming era produced people. Those people produced the aviation world we fly in today.

Locklear had two years at the top - from his first public performance in 1919 to the oil field at Alhambra on August 2, 1920. By any measure, a short run. But he was first: the first to prove that a human being could live on the outside of a flying airplane.

He proved it not because anyone asked him to, and not because he was trying to become famous. He proved it because he was a mechanic, the wing fitting was loose, and he saw no particular reason why two thousand feet of altitude should change what needed to be done.

Primary sources: Henry Serrano Villard, Contact (1968), and archival newspaper coverage from the Library of Congress collections.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear became the world’s first professional wing walker in 1919, capitalizing on post-WWI surplus Jennies and a country hungry to see aviation up close.
His performances were made possible by a deep physical understanding of biplane aerodynamics and a trusted partnership with pilot Skeets Elliott - wing walking was never a one-person act.
Hollywood’s demand for real aerial footage made Locklear a film star; “The Great Air Robbery” (1919) was a genuine commercial hit for Universal Pictures.
The flares attached to the Jenny for a night film sequence on August 2, 1920 destroyed the crew’s visual altitude reference. Locklear and Elliott were killed when the aircraft failed to recover from its spiral dive.
The barnstorming era Locklear helped launch introduced millions of rural Americans to aviation, producing a generation that built the modern aviation industry - airlines, airports, and aircraft factories included.