Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Hollywood Night Dive That Killed Aviation's Greatest Daredevil

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1918 not as a performance but as a mechanical solution - and was dead at 28 before the barnstorming era he helped create had run its course. His story is the origin point of American air show culture, and it ended on camera in front of 12,000 people on August 2, 1920.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas. Before aviation, he worked as a carpenter - a trade that gave him an intuitive understanding of structures, materials, and load paths. Those instincts would prove directly useful when the structure he was navigating was a biplane wing at a hundred miles an hour.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Locklear enlisted in the Army Air Service. He trained as a pilot and became a flight instructor at Barron Field, just outside Fort Worth, Texas.

How Did Wing Walking Start?

Wing walking began as maintenance, not performance. The Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” - the standard military training aircraft of the era - had a recurring problem: a radiator cap that could work loose in flight. If it did and no one fixed it, the engine overheated. The aircraft was lost either way.

Locklear’s solution was to climb out of the cockpit while his student held the controls, crawl along the fuselage, tighten the cap, and return. He was on the outside of a moving aircraft at altitude, in a slipstream he later described as a physical wall of wind, on fabric made slick with oil and morning dew.

He survived. And he noticed he liked it.

What drew him wasn’t the danger - it was the problem-solving. He described it as feeling like part of the airplane rather than a passenger inside it. He began going out on the wing with no mechanical reason at all.

What Locklear Figured Out About Wing Walking

Locklear developed what became the standard vocabulary of the discipline: the walk from the cockpit out to the wingtip, the headstand on the center section, standing upright on the upper wing with arms extended. His core insight was counterintuitive: the relative wind was an asset, not a threat. Position the body correctly and air pressure holds you in place. Fight it, and you lose.

The move that established his reputation was the midair plane transfer. In the autumn of 1918, he stepped from the lower wing of one aircraft to another - two Jennies flying in formation, roughly two feet apart, both propellers spinning within arm’s reach, several thousand feet above Texas. He made the transfer, took the controls of the second aircraft, and flew it home. Witnesses said they could not breathe for the thirty seconds it took.

The Armistice came one month later, on November 11, 1918, ending the war - and the institutional context that had given Locklear his aircraft and his audience.

Locklear’s Role in the Barnstorming Era

After the war, Locklear teamed with pilot Milton “Skeets” Elliott and a third pilot, Shirley Short. They acquired surplus Jennies - the Army was selling them for around $300 apiece after the Armistice - and built a small aerial exhibition troupe.

That surplus of cheap aircraft and trained pilots with no war left to fight is what created the barnstorming era. Thousands of military-trained aviators scattered across America with their skills intact and the machinery to use them. Most barnstormers were selling airplane rides: five dollars for five minutes, an honest introduction to flight that brought hundreds of thousands of Americans into the air for the first time.

Locklear was selling something different. He was selling the experience of watching a human being do something that looked physically impossible and survive it - the moment when a crowd holding its breath finally exhales together.

Hollywood and The Great Air Robbery

Universal Pictures came to Locklear in 1919. The postwar film industry was hungry for aviation content - the war had made the airplane romantic and modern - and audiences wanted real flying, not miniatures or trick photography.

Locklear starred in The Great Air Robbery, a silent picture in which he played an airmail pilot. Every foot of flying was genuine. There were no stunt doubles because no one else alive could do what Locklear could do. The film was a substantial success.

Universal immediately put him into a second picture: The Skywayman.

The Night of August 2, 1920

The final sequence of The Skywayman called for a crash. Director James Horne wanted it filmed at night, with searchlights and floodlights blazing for maximum dramatic effect.

The plan was straightforward: Locklear would put the Jenny into a spin from altitude above Mercury Athletic Field in Los Angeles, spiral down toward the cameras, and pull out low to the ground - close enough to look catastrophic on film, high enough to recover safely. Skeets Elliott was riding in the rear cockpit. The 12,000 people who had filled the stands and spilled onto the grass believed they were watching a live exhibition.

The cameras rolled. The searchlights swept the dark California sky. Locklear climbed to approximately 2,000 feet and pushed the nose into a spin.

He did not pull out. The aircraft struck the ground in a shallow drainage pond at the edge of the field. Both Locklear and Elliott were killed on impact. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old.

What Caused the Crash - And Why It Matters for Pilots

The investigation found no definitive cause. Some witnesses reported the aircraft appeared out of control before impact; others said it looked deliberate until the final seconds.

The most widely accepted explanation is that the floodlights blinded Locklear during the spin. The mechanism is straightforward and still relevant.

In a spin, the inner ear generates false information about orientation - spatial disorientation sets in quickly and is difficult to override. The only reliable corrective is outside visual reference: the horizon, lights on the ground, any fixed point outside the cockpit. Remove that, and the vestibular system wins. Locklear had no gyroscopic attitude indicator. His altimeter would not have responded fast enough during a high-speed spinning descent. He was flying entirely on what he could see outside the aircraft. If the floodlights washed that reference out, he was effectively blind at the controls of a spinning airplane at an unknown altitude above 12,000 people.

The same principle - that outside visual reference is the primary defense against spatial disorientation at night and in IMC - is foundational to instrument training today.

What Happened to the Footage

The studio debated whether to include the crash footage. They included it.

The Skywayman was released that fall with the actual footage of Locklear’s death in the final reel. Some found that decision monstrous. Others saw it as consistent with how Locklear had always worked: nothing staged, nothing faked - just the reality of what an airplane and its pilot could do.

He was buried in Fort Worth with military honors. Twelve pilots flew over the cemetery.

Locklear’s Legacy

Locklear died before the barnstorming era peaked, but he established its foundation. He had demonstrated that wing walking was physically survivable when approached systematically - that there were correct body positions, weight distributions, and understandings of relative wind that separated a calculated stunt from a reckless one. The pilots who came after him learned from what he had worked out.

The aerial circus troupes of the mid-1920s - the Gates Flying Circus and dozens of others that toured county fairs and open fields from Maine to California - were built on principles Locklear had established in less than three years of public performance.

The era was brief. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 brought federal oversight to aviation and began closing down the loosest of the flying shows. The barnstorming era ran from roughly 1919 to 1926: seven years, a handful of summers.

In those summers, aviation went from military technology to something ordinary Americans had watched from a field on a Sunday afternoon with their kids on their shoulders. The public appetite for commercial aviation - for buying a ticket on an airline in the late 1920s - was built in part by that familiarity. By the time passenger service expanded seriously, Americans already believed in the airplane. Many had watched a man stand on the wing of one and grin from a thousand feet up.

Ormer Locklear started that conversation.

Key Takeaways

• Locklear first climbed out on the wing of a Curtiss JN-4 in 1918 to fix a loose radiator cap - performance came later
• His midair plane transfer between two aircraft in formation flight had never been done before and defined his career
• He died August 2, 1920, age 28, during the filming of The Skywayman; the prevailing theory is that studio floodlights destroyed his outside visual reference during a nighttime spin, causing unrecoverable spatial disorientation
• The crash footage was included in the released film
• The barnstorming era Locklear helped create (1919–1926) gave millions of Americans their first direct experience of aviation and built the public confidence that made commercial passenger service viable