Ormer Locklear, the Human Fly of the Barnstorming Age, and the Night the Flares Didn't Cut Over DeMille Field

Ormer Locklear was the barnstorming era’s most famous daredevil - a Texas pilot who pioneered wing walking and airplane-to-airplane transfers in the years just after World War I. On the night of August 2, 1920, he was killed at DeMille Field in Los Angeles while filming a night dive for the movie The Skywayman, when the searchlight signal that was supposed to tell him to pull out never went dark. He was 28 years old.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas, and raised around Fort Worth. By every account he was a fearless kid who climbed water towers and rooftops, and once reportedly rode a bicycle off the roof of a shed just to see what would happen.

When the United States entered the First World War, Locklear joined the Army and went through flight training at Barron Field, near Fort Worth. The aircraft he trained in was the Curtiss JN-4 - the biplane everyone called the “Jenny.” It was built of wood, wire, and fabric, powered by a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine, with almost nothing you’d recognize as an instrument. You flew it by feel, with the wind full in your face.

How Did Wing Walking Begin?

The legend started with an in-flight repair. During a training flight, something worked loose on Locklear’s aircraft - accounts differ on whether it was a radiator cap or a piece of cowling. Instead of returning to report it, Locklear unstrapped, climbed out of the cockpit into a 60-mph wind, walked out onto the fuselage, fixed the problem, and climbed back in.

More importantly, he liked it. He began climbing onto the wings on purpose, hanging from the landing gear, and standing in the slipstream with his arms spread. Other airfields asked him to perform for their cadets, and the Army - sensing a morale booster - let him run with it.

There was no manual for any of this. Locklear worked out the aerodynamics himself, in the air, using his own body as the flight-test program. He learned that moving aft brought the nose up, and exactly how hard the pilot up front had to fight the controls to keep the aircraft level while he moved around outside. He and his pilots developed a silent hand language, because nothing could be heard over the engine and the wind.

What Was Barnstorming?

When the war ended, thousands of surplus Jennys sat in crates, and returning military pilots came home to a country with no need for them. You could buy a Jenny for a few hundred dollars - sometimes less. That gave rise to the barnstorming era, a wild, unregulated stretch when a pilot could land on any willing field, buzz the town to draw a crowd, and sell rides for a dollar or two - sometimes charging by weight, a penny a pound, or five cents a pound for heavier passengers.

Locklear wasn’t interested in selling rides. He wanted to put on the greatest aerial show anyone had ever seen, and he had two pilots to make it possible: Milton “Skeets” Elliott and Shirley Short. These were the men who held a temperamental biplane rock-steady while Locklear performed outside it. The trust between Locklear and Elliott, in particular, is the heart of the story - Elliott kept the aircraft dead level while his best friend dangled off the wires.

What Made Locklear Famous?

The trick that put his name in every newspaper in America was the airplane-to-airplane transfer. Two Jennys flew tight formation, one above the other, matched in speed and heading at roughly 40 to 50 mph. Locklear would climb out of the lower aircraft, grab a rope ladder trailing from the upper one, and transfer hand over hand - a thousand feet up, with no parachute.

In those early barnstorming years, the parachute was not standard equipment, and many of these men flew without one. When Locklear was suspended between two aircraft, there was no reset and no rescue - there was the grab, or there was the ground. He did it anyway, again and again, along with one-handed hangs from the landing gear, standing on the top wing in banking turns, and even car-to-airplane transfers, dropping a ladder to snatch a man out of a speeding automobile. Crowds of tens of thousands came out to watch.

The Night the Flares Didn’t Cut: August 2, 1920

Hollywood came calling because the footage was real. Before trick photography could fake it, a shot of a man leaping between two airplanes required a man to actually do it. Locklear’s first film, The Great Air Robbery (1919), drew audiences in numbers that made the studios take notice. He moved to California, became a genuine celebrity, and began work on his second picture, The Skywayman.

On the night of August 2, 1920, the crew was filming at DeMille Field in Los Angeles. The scene called for a dramatic night dive, straight toward the ground, with the aircraft trailing magnesium flares so the cameras could capture a streak of fire falling out of the dark - a plunge pulled out at the last possible moment.

Skeets Elliott was flying, with Locklear aboard. The safety plan hinged on the ground crew’s searchlights: they illuminated the aircraft for the cameras, and when it came time to recover, the lights were supposed to cut off. Lights out was the signal to pull up.

The Jenny came down out of the black in a screaming dive, flares blazing. And the lights never went out. We’ll never know exactly why - the crew may have been caught up in the spectacle, someone may have wanted a lower shot, or it may simply have been a mistake in the dark and noise of a night shoot. But diving straight down with flares burning and searchlights blazing into your face, you have no reference to the ground. The one cue Locklear had staked his life on never came.

Ormer Locklear and Skeets Elliott flew the Jenny straight into an oil sump at the edge of the field. Both men were killed instantly. Locklear was 28. In the hard business of the day, the studio kept the cameras rolling, filmed the crash, and released The Skywayman just weeks later - with advertising that used his death to sell tickets.

Why Locklear Still Matters

Everything Locklear worked out with his own body over open Texas fields - the lessons about weight and balance, slipstream, and how two aircraft behave in close formation - became real, hard-won knowledge. The wing walkers and transfer artists who followed built on what he figured out.

More broadly, the barnstormers are a large part of why aviation didn’t quietly fade after World War I. In 1919, the average American had never been near an airplane; it was a war machine and a curiosity. Barnstormers flew into small towns and turned the sky into a spectacle people would drive fifty miles to see. They put airplanes in front of ordinary people and made a farmer in Kansas look up and think, I want to do that. A whole generation of pilots caught the flying bug at a barnstorming show.

There’s a lesson for anyone who still flies. Every safety plan is only as good as the person executing it. When you brief a signal, an abort point, a callout, or a go-around trigger, you are trusting someone with your life and being trusted in return. Locklear died because the plan was sound and the execution wasn’t - the one time someone else didn’t cut the lights.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear (1891–1920) was the barnstorming era’s most famous daredevil, pioneering wing walking and airplane-to-airplane transfers on the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.”
• He worked out the aerodynamics of wing walking himself, in flight, developing a silent hand language with pilots Skeets Elliott and Shirley Short.
• His signature stunt was transferring between two aircraft in flight, roughly 1,000 feet up and without a parachute.
• He died on August 2, 1920, at DeMille Field filming The Skywayman, when the searchlight signal to pull out of a night dive never went dark.
• Barnstormers like Locklear kept aviation alive after WWI by putting airplanes in front of ordinary Americans and inspiring a generation of pilots.