Ormer Locklear, the First Wing Walker, and the Night the Floodlights Blinded the Greatest Stuntman in Aviation

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking because a radiator cap came loose at three thousand feet and somebody had to fix it. That improvised repair became the foundation of an entirely new kind of performance, one that defined the barnstorming era and put aviation in front of millions of Americans who had never seen an airplane up close.

What Was the Barnstorming Era?

The Armistice came in November 1918, and it ended almost overnight the massive aviation infrastructure the United States had built for the war. Thousands of trained pilots found themselves in civilian clothes with no obvious future. The government auctioned off surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennies - a capable two-seat trainer - for as little as $1,200, roughly the price of a used car at the time.

What do you do with a pilot’s skills and a cheap airplane in peacetime? You go barnstorming.

The formula was simple: fly out to farm country, find a flat field near a barn, land without asking permission half the time, and put up hand-painted signs in town. Rides for five dollars. Stunts for free. The people came reliably, because in 1919, most of rural America had never seen an airplane except as a distant speck. Barnstormers were bringing the future down into somebody’s hayfield.

Why Was the Curtiss Jenny Perfect for Barnstorming?

The Jenny wasn’t fast - about 75 mph flat out. Its Curtiss OX-5 engine produced 90 horsepower and was reliable only by the standards of the day, which is to say it quit on you regularly. But the Jenny was forgiving, slow enough for a ground crowd to follow, and available by the thousands at military surplus auctions across the country.

Barnstormers quickly realized that straight flying wasn’t enough. Loops and spins helped. But the act that truly stopped traffic - the one that had farm wives covering their mouths - was when somebody climbed out of the cockpit and stood on the wing.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1891. As a boy, he walked along rooftop ridges the way other kids walked fence rails. Heights didn’t frighten him; they interested him. He worked as a carpenter and builder before the war, a man who had a natural understanding of balance, weight, and his own body in space.

He enlisted in the Army Signal Corps when America entered the war and became a flight instructor at Barron Field, near Fort Worth, Texas. He was patient and precise, with an instinct for airplanes that couldn’t be taught.

How Did Wing Walking Actually Start?

Sometime around 1918, Locklear was airborne in a Jenny when something went wrong up front on the aircraft - accounts vary between a radiator cap and a fuel cap, but they agree the problem was reachable from outside the cockpit, not within it. Locklear throttled back, trimmed the airplane, and climbed out into the slipstream at roughly 60 mph.

He worked his way forward along the fuselage, fixed the problem, and climbed back in.

When he landed and told people what he’d done, the reaction wasn’t horror. It was wonder. Locklear started thinking about what else might be possible out there.

He began practicing deliberately, refining techniques with a pilot named Skeets Elliott, who flew the Jenny while Locklear worked the outside of it. By the time they left the Army, they had a vocabulary of stunts no one had ever performed before.

What Did Locklear’s Act Look Like?

He started with the fundamentals: hanging from the landing gear, standing on the top wing with arms spread, the Jenny flying level at a thousand feet while he balanced there. Then he raised the stakes.

Locklear perfected the mid-air plane transfer. Skeets would fly the Jenny low and slow over a second airplane. Locklear would hang from the undercarriage of the upper aircraft and, at the right moment, drop onto the upper wing of the airplane below. Not a jump - a transfer. One moving aircraft to another, with nothing between him and the ground except air, timing, and complete control of his own fear.

The Wright Brothers had only flown sixteen years earlier. The idea that a man could be airborne outside of an airplane, climbing around on it, jumping between them - that was from another universe entirely. Crowds didn’t know how to process it.

How Did Hollywood Get Involved?

By 1919, the film industry understood that aviation made for spectacular pictures. Studios needed pilots who could do things on camera that would make audiences lean forward.

Locklear signed with Universal Pictures. His first film, The Great Air Robbery, was released in 1919. It’s a silent picture with footage that looks like it shouldn’t exist - Locklear transferring between aircraft, hanging in open sky, the camera struggling to keep up. No special effects. No safety cables. No net.

The film succeeded. The studio wanted more.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

The second film was The Skywayman, and it killed him.

On August 2, 1920, they were shooting a night sequence over the Dominguez Hills outside of Los Angeles. The script called for Locklear’s Jenny to be visible against the night sky, so the production rigged powerful arc lights on the ground to illuminate the aircraft from below - standard equipment for outdoor film sets of the era.

What no one had fully worked out was what those lights would do to Locklear’s night vision.

He was in a spin when it went wrong. Witnesses on the ground agreed the airplane came out of the spin too low, at an angle with no recovery, and went in near the lights at high speed. Ormer Locklear was 29 years old. Skeets Elliott, in the cockpit that night, died with him.

What Was Locklear’s Legacy for Aviation?

Barnstorming continued through most of the 1920s, until the Air Commerce Act of 1926 gave the federal government authority over aviation for the first time. Licensing and safety rules began pushing out the wildest acts.

But Locklear is the one who defined what barnstorming looked like at its peak. Every flying circus that came after him, every performer who climbed out onto a wing to get a crowd on its feet, was working inside a tradition he had invented.

The barnstormers did something beyond entertainment. They sold aviation to a country that didn’t quite believe in it yet. Every farmer who paid five dollars for a Jenny ride went home with a story. Every kid who watched Locklear walk on a wing grew up with aviation as something real and possible. The people who became airline passengers in the 1930s, accepting commercial flying as ordinary and sensible, many of them had their first encounter with airplanes at a barnstorming show in someone’s field.

The barnstormers were the advance team for everything that came after. Locklear left no autobiography - he didn’t live long enough - but the footage survives. Fragments of two films that look like they were shot on another planet, and the accounts of people who were there, who watched him work, and reportedly stopped breathing.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking around 1918 as a practical fix for an in-flight mechanical problem, not as a planned stunt
Surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jennies sold for as little as $1,200 after WWI, making barnstorming economically accessible to out-of-work military pilots
Locklear signed with Universal Pictures in 1919 and made two films; the second, The Skywayman, killed him on August 2, 1920
The likely cause of his crash was arc lights blinding his night vision during a film shoot over Dominguez Hills, California
Barnstorming built the public appetite for commercial aviation that made the airline industry of the 1930s possible; Locklear’s acts were a direct part of that foundation