Ormer Locklear, the King of the Wing Walkers, and the Night a Movie Camera Captured the Death of the Man Who Invented Mid-Air Stunts

Ormer Locklear invented the art of aerial stunt performance - wing walking, mid-air aircraft transfers, low-altitude spins for movie cameras - and compressed his entire career into roughly eighteen months between 1919 and his death on August 2, 1920. A former WWI trainer pilot from Greenville, Texas, he became Hollywood’s first aerial stuntman before dying on camera at age twenty-eight, when floodlights blinded him during a nighttime film shoot over Los Angeles.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas. He grew up working with his hands - engines, rooflines, anything requiring comfort at height. Heights didn’t concern him. Most things didn’t.

When America entered the First World War, he enlisted and was sent to Barron Field near Fort Worth to train as a pilot. The standard trainer was the Curtiss JN-4 - the Jenny. It flew reasonably well, but it had quirks. Loose bracing wires. Fittings that wanted checking. The accepted procedure was to land, fix the problem on the ground, and take off again.

Locklear climbed out of the cockpit while airborne, made the repair in flight, and climbed back in. His instructors were horrified. His fellow cadets were transfixed. His mechanics confirmed the repairs held.

The Army did not court-martial him. Instead they watched, asked questions, and eventually used him as a demonstration pilot. Nothing in the world drew a crowd faster than a man calmly standing on the wing of a moving airplane.

How He Built the Act

By 1919, the war was over. Locklear partnered with Milton “Skeets” Elliott, a steady pilot entirely willing to sit in the cockpit while Locklear performed on the outside of the airplane. Skeets flew the aircraft. Locklear flew everything else.

Their act ran through county fairs and air meets across the South and Midwest. Locklear would climb out onto the wing, walk to the wingtip, hang by one arm from the landing gear struts, sit on the tail, and do a headstand on the upper wing. He didn’t simply have nerve - he understood the physics. His time repairing aircraft in flight had taught him to read a biplane the way experienced pilots read weather: where airflow was smooth, where it was turbulent, which structural members would hold his weight and which would not.

Farmers drove twenty miles over dirt roads to watch. Thousands stood in August heat to see something they couldn’t describe to anyone who hadn’t been there.

The First Mid-Air Aircraft Transfer

In the spring of 1919, Locklear attempted something no one had done before: he transferred from one airplane to another while both were airborne. Two biplanes in close formation, separated by ten to fifteen feet, prop wash churning between them. Locklear crossed the gap on his arms and legs, using whatever structure both aircraft offered as handholds.

He said afterward that the hardest part wasn’t the transfer itself - it was the moment of decision just before it. Hanging off the first airplane’s wing struts, looking across at the second plane, he had to choose to go. Once committed, he said, it was just movement. The thinking was finished. His body did the work.

The act expanded to larger venues: Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, New Orleans. Thousands showed up wherever he flew.

Hollywood and The Great Air Robbery

Universal Pictures approached Locklear in 1919. He accepted. The picture was The Great Air Robbery - a western built around aerial chases and mail robberies, with Locklear performing every stunt himself because no one else alive could do them. No double. No camera tricks. Just Locklear and Elliott.

The film was a sensation. Audiences packed theaters to watch stunts no actor in the frame had performed and none could have. A second picture followed almost immediately: The Skywayman. By the time it was in production, Locklear was nationally famous - not fair-circuit famous, but front-page famous, the kind where strangers recognized his face on the street.

August 2, 1920: The Crash the Camera Caught

The final sequence of The Skywayman required a nighttime scene. The script called for Locklear’s aircraft to enter a spin at altitude, pull out low, and land. High-powered floodlights would illuminate the airplane from the ground. Everything was arranged. The crew was in position.

The night of August 2, 1920, was clear over Los Angeles.

Locklear and Elliott climbed in and took off. Locklear brought the airplane to altitude and began the spin. As the aircraft descended through the dark, the floodlights came on - blazing directly into the cockpit, blinding both men during a descending spin at low altitude over the oil fields south of the city.

They did not pull out in time. The airplane struck the ground. Both men were killed. Ormer Locklear was twenty-eight years old.

The cameras captured all of it. Universal included the footage in The Skywayman as the film’s dramatic conclusion. Audiences who came to watch Ormer Locklear perform watched him die - and in the first seconds of viewing, some had no idea that what they were seeing was real.

Why This Matters for Anyone Who Flies

The barnstorming era didn’t end with Locklear’s death. It accelerated. He had proved there was a massive audience for aerial performance, and every wing walker who followed knew his name and knew exactly how he had died. They got in the airplane anyway.

The era ran from roughly 1919 until 1926, when the Air Commerce Act gave the federal government its first real authority over civil aviation. That legislation built the foundation for the world’s safest aviation system - but it also closed the door on the wide-open sky where a man with an airplane and enough nerve could do whatever he could think of.

What no legislation could touch was the attitude Locklear embodied: that flying is not transportation. That it demands your complete attention. That you bring your whole self to it in a way ordinary life rarely requires. That attitude survives today in every EAA chapter fly-in, in every pilot who still flies a Stearman or a Waco.

Locklear didn’t invent that attitude. He flew it to its absolute limit.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear (born 1891, Greenville, Texas) developed wing walking while repairing his Curtiss JN-4 trainer in flight during WWI, turning a maintenance workaround into the foundation of aerial performance
He and pilot Milton “Skeets” Elliott performed across the South and Midwest from 1919, with Locklear making the first recorded mid-air aircraft transfer that same spring
Universal Pictures cast him in The Great Air Robbery (1919) and The Skywayman (1920), making him aviation’s first Hollywood stuntman - performing every stunt himself, with no double
Locklear and Elliott died on August 2, 1920, when studio floodlights blinded them mid-spin during a night shoot; Locklear was 28; the crash was captured on film and included in the finished picture
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 ended the barnstorming era, but the culture Locklear helped define - flying as total presence, not mere transportation - persists in general aviation today