Ormer Locklear, the First Wing-Walker, and the Klieg Lights That Ended the Man Who Survived Everything Else

Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1919, transformed it into a Hollywood career, and was killed on camera on August 2, 1920 - not by recklessness, but by a film crew’s arc lights that destroyed his night vision mid-spin. He was 28 years old. The crash was caught on film. The studio chose not to use it.

The Surplus Aircraft That Made Barnstorming Possible

To understand Locklear, you have to understand what American aviation looked like in the months after the armistice.

The Army Air Service had trained thousands of pilots during World War I and ordered aircraft by the thousands. The Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the primary trainer for the entire American pilot training program, was built in numbers approaching 10,000 aircraft. Then the war ended - almost overnight.

The government had no use for those surplus trainers. A Jenny that cost the government roughly $5,000 to build sold for $200 to $300 on the open market. A Model T Ford cost about $350 in 1919. For roughly the same price as a car, a returning pilot could own a genuine, flyable biplane that cruised at 65 miles an hour and carried a passenger.

Thousands of those aircraft ended up in private hands almost immediately after the armistice. Some pilots used their Jennies to start charter businesses or flight schools - the seed of what would grow into general aviation. Many others barnstormed.

The term comes from landing in farmers’ fields and overnighting in their barns. The economics were simple and precarious: a dollar a ride, maybe ten minutes in the air. Turn thirty flights on a Saturday and you had enough to eat, enough for fuel, maybe enough left over for parts. It was a nomadic life. Most of these pilots owned their aircraft and nothing else.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in Greenville, Texas in October 1891 and grew up in Fort Worth. Before the war, he worked construction - good with his hands, comfortable at heights, and not particularly impressed by physical danger.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Locklear enlisted in the Army Signal Corps and went through flight training. He turned out to be a naturally gifted pilot: confident, smooth on the controls, with the instinctive feel for an aircraft that can be developed but not truly taught. He was assigned to Love Field in Dallas as a flight instructor and never received orders for France. The armistice came first.

He emerged from the war as a 27-year-old civilian with skills the peacetime economy had no clear use for. He answered the barnstormer’s essential question - how do you make somebody choose your show over the next fellow’s show? - in a way that changed American aviation culture forever.

How Wing-Walking Was Born

The origin story, as it has come down through aviation history, starts with a maintenance problem.

During a training flight at Love Field, Locklear noticed a fitting had worked loose - the kind of small mechanical issue that could become a large one if ignored. The standard response was to land immediately. Locklear throttled back, steadied the aircraft, and climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing to deal with it himself.

The biplane wing of a Curtiss Jenny is fabric over a wooden structure. It is not a platform designed to be walked on. The rigging wires can be grabbed. The interplane struts are solid. But the surface itself is thin, flexible, and not meant to support a man at altitude.

Locklear reached the fitting, dealt with it, climbed back into the cockpit, and landed. His fellow pilots on the ground had watched the whole thing. Their reaction was not alarm. They asked him to do it again.

He thought about that long enough to realize something: if trained pilots reacted that way, the public would react the same way - except the public would pay to watch.

The Stunts That Made People Stop Breathing

Locklear teamed up with a partner pilot named Skeets Elliott and developed what was, for its time, the most sophisticated aerial exhibition in the country.

Shows began with standard aerobatics - loops, spins, chandelles - to establish the pilot’s competence before asking the audience to fear for his safety. Then the throttle would come back. The engine note would change. And Locklear would climb out of the cockpit.

He had translated a lifetime of physical intuition - construction work, flight training, thousands of hours aloft - into a skill set nobody else on earth possessed. He could read the wing’s attitude through his feet. He could feel a bank beginning to develop and correct for it by shifting his weight before it became a problem. He walked to the wingtip, stood there, waved at the crowd. Sometimes he sat on the wingtip as if it were a front porch.

The signature stunt was the airplane transfer. Elliott would fly in formation alongside Locklear’s aircraft - approximately 15 feet of airspace between the fuselages, both aircraft level at the same airspeed. Locklear would walk from one to the other. In mid-air. No safety line. At altitude. At 60 miles an hour.

Why Barnstorming Mattered

There was no commercial radio to speak of in 1919. No regular motion pictures in most small towns. No television for another quarter century. A traveling show of any kind was an occasion - but this was not a circus. This was aviation: the technology that had just won the war, the thing newspapers were calling the future, appearing overhead, close enough to see the pilot’s face.

Locklear’s shows drew 10,000 to 15,000 people to fields outside towns that had half that population. People drove for hours on dirt roads. Farmers brought their families in wagons. Local newspapers covered arrivals on the front page.

He was, for a brief period, as famous as any celebrity in the country. His name appeared in papers in cities he had never visited.

From the Barnstorming Circuit to Hollywood

In 1919, Universal Pictures approached Locklear about starring in a motion picture. He would play the lead, perform his own stunts, and be filmed from other aircraft. The film was “The Great Air Robbery.”

The flying sequences gave audiences who had never attended a barnstorming show a chance to see what he could do - the altitude, the ground far below, Locklear on the wing in a way no newspaper photograph had ever captured. When the film was released in late 1919, it was a substantial commercial success.

Fox Film Corporation came calling almost immediately with a contract for a second film: “The Skywayman.” Production began in the summer of 1920. Locklear was 28 years old and at the absolute peak of his career.

The Klieg Lights: August 2, 1920

The script for The Skywayman called for a climactic night scene - a dramatic spin and crash sequence filmed in darkness. Night flying was still relatively unusual in 1920, and the studio believed the visual drama of an aircraft against a dark sky would be spectacular on film.

To illuminate the sequence, the production arranged arc lights - klieg lights - around the filming location, aimed upward to flood the area as the aircraft came in for its final approach.

The maneuver called for a controlled spin from altitude with recovery at approximately 500 feet. Locklear had performed variations of this hundreds of times. It was well within his demonstrated capability.

What nobody had fully calculated was what those lights would do to a pilot at altitude.

As Locklear nosed over and began the spin toward the field, the arc lights hit him directly. His night vision, built up over the course of the flight to altitude, was gone in an instant. He could not see the horizon. He could not see the altimeter. He could not judge altitude or attitude from visual reference.

The aircraft did not pull out. Ormer Locklear and Skeets Elliott were killed on impact. August 2, 1920. The film crew was still rolling.

The studio debated whether to use the crash footage. The answer was no. The Skywayman was completed using footage already shot and released as a tribute. Locklear’s final flight was not included.

He is buried in Fort Worth, Texas.

What Came After

His death did not end barnstorming. The era ran for another seven or eight years after Locklear died. The Gates Flying Circus, which became the largest and most successful touring aerial show of the period, continued drawing enormous crowds. Clyde Pangborn - who would eventually complete the first nonstop transpacific flight - worked the barnstorming circuit as a wing-walker and stunt pilot before turning to long-distance flying.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 began bringing regulatory order to the industry. Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 changed the national conversation about what flight could be. The barnstormer began to look like a figure from an earlier chapter.

But for those eight years after the armistice, the men and women who barnstormed kept aviation in front of the American public at a moment when commercial aviation was not yet real and military aviation had gone quiet. They were doing something that is rarely acknowledged: making the public care.

Every kid who stood in a field in 1922 and watched a man walk on a wing at a thousand feet went home differently than he arrived. Some grew up to become pilots. Some bought tickets on the early airlines. Some built aircraft.

“The Great Air Robbery” still survives in film archives.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1919 after an impromptu in-flight repair at Love Field, Dallas, turned into a performance concept.
Post-WWI surplus Jennies sold for as little as $200 - roughly the price of a Model T - which made barnstorming economically accessible to thousands of returning military pilots.
Locklear’s barnstorming shows drew crowds of 10,000–15,000 people to fields outside small towns, making him one of the most recognized names in America by 1920.
He died on August 2, 1920, not from a failed stunt, but because production arc lights destroyed his night vision mid-spin during filming of The Skywayman.
The barnstorming era lasted until roughly 1927–1928, keeping aviation visible to the American public during the critical gap between military aviation’s post-war drawdown and the rise of commercial flight.