Ormer Locklear, the King of the Wing Walkers, and the Night the Arc Lights Killed Him Over DeMille Field

Ormer Locklear was a Texas-born stunt pilot known as the King of the Wing Walkers, the first person to perform a live plane-to-plane transfer in flight. On August 2, 1920, he was killed at DeMille Field in Los Angeles while filming a nighttime spinning dive for the movie The Skywayman, when the ground crew failed to cut the arc lights that were his only cue to pull out. He was 28 years old.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in 1891 in the Fort Worth, Texas, area. Before the war he worked as a bricklayer and builder - a tall, easy-going young man with a habit of climbing the tallest thing in town just to see if he could.

When the United States entered the First World War, Locklear enlisted and the Army made him a flight instructor. He was stationed at Barron Field, south of Fort Worth, teaching cadets to fly the aircraft that trained nearly every American pilot of the era: the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the Jenny.

What Was the Curtiss Jenny?

The Curtiss JN-4 was a two-wing trainer built of wood, wire, and doped cotton fabric that drummed in the wind. It was powered by a Curtiss OX-5 engine producing about 90 horsepower, which threw a fine mist of castor oil back at the pilot and gave the airplane its distinctive smell of hot oil, banana-scented dope, and gasoline.

The Jenny stalled at roughly 45 knots and was famously forgiving to fly - which is exactly why the Army bought thousands of them. Those thousands of surplus aircraft would later become the raw material of the barnstorming era.

How Did Locklear Start Wing Walking?

According to the story, something worked loose on Locklear’s Jenny during a flight over Barron Field - some accounts say a radiator cap. Rather than land, Locklear unbuckled, climbed out of the cockpit, and walked onto the wing while the airplane flew itself. He fixed the problem, walked back, and climbed in.

The risk was total. In 1918, the Army did not issue parachutes to trainer pilots. There were no handholds, no safety net - only spruce spars, taut fabric, flying wires, and a slipstream trying to peel a man off the airplane.

Locklear liked it, and he began doing it deliberately. Together with fellow instructors Milton “Skeets” Elliott and Shirley Short, he turned the stunt into an act, hanging off the landing gear and standing on the top wing with his arms outstretched. The brass were furious - until they noticed that cadets showed up to watch, and morale made the stunts suddenly good for the war effort.

What Was Barnstorming and Why Did It Take Off?

The war ended in November 1918, leaving America with a surplus problem: thousands of Jennys and tens of thousands of young men who knew how to fly them and little else. War-surplus airplanes sold for a few hundred dollars, sometimes still in the crate - cheaper than a good horse and buggy.

That combination - cheap airplanes, hungry pilots, and a public that had never seen an aircraft up close - created the barnstorming era. The name came from theater: a barnstormer was a traveling actor who would play any barn in any town for whatever the locals paid. The pilots were traveling players too, and the airplane was the whole show.

Locklear mustered out and partnered with promoter William Pickens, who understood he wasn’t selling airplane rides - he was selling Ormer Locklear. Pickens billed him as the King of the Wing Walkers.

What Was the Plane Change Stunt?

Locklear’s most famous feat was the plane change - the first live plane-to-plane transfer in history, which he worked out with Skeets Elliott.

Two Jennys flew in formation, one above the other, roughly 15 to 20 feet apart, both wide open and holding station. Locklear climbed onto the top wing of the lower airplane. The upper airplane trailed a rope ladder, and Locklear grabbed a rung and stepped off into empty air - nothing beneath his boots but a thousand feet of open sky, the slipstream clawing at him and the ladder bucking. He climbed hand over hand into the second cockpit.

There was no radio between the two aircraft. Every transfer was flown on hand signals, nerve, and a plan worked out on the ground that morning. Locklear’s gift was making the terrifying look casual, almost bored - which only made the crowds scream louder.

The Reality Behind the Spectacle

It’s easy a century later to file these acts under “stunt” and move on. The reality was harsher.

There was never a net.
There was rarely a usable parachute.
There was no radio between airplanes.
The Jennys had no real brakes - just wheels and a tailskid dragging in the grass.
The OX-5 engines were notorious for quitting, and many barnstorming deaths came not from the stunts but from engines failing over bad ground.

The pilots did this two or three times a day, town after town, all summer - sleeping under the wing, eating what the farmer’s wife brought out, patching fabric with whatever they had, and moving on before the crowd’s ears stopped ringing.

How Did Hollywood Get Involved?

Locklear’s fame drew Hollywood. A studio brought him to Los Angeles in 1919 to make The Great Air Robbery, which did well. Audiences realized they were seeing something new: real flying, real stunts, a real man hanging off a real airplane over real ground - not a camera trick.

He earned serious money for a bricklayer’s son from Texas. In the summer of 1920, he began a second picture: The Skywayman.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

The Skywayman called for a night scene in which Locklear flew a spinning dive down out of the darkness - an airplane apparently out of control - and pulled out at the last second. It was filmed at DeMille Field in Los Angeles on the night of August 2, 1920, with Skeets Elliott flying alongside him.

Filming an airplane at night in 1920 required light. The crew set up large carbon arc searchlights to track Locklear and fixed magnesium flares to his wingtips so the Jenny would trail white fire through the spin.

The danger was the darkness itself. A pilot recovers from a spin by reference to the horizon and ground - but Locklear couldn’t see either. So the crew arranged a signal: the arc lights would stay on him during the dive, and when he reached the altitude to pull out, the men on the ground would cut the lights. Darkness was the cue to recover.

The Jenny came spinning down out of the black sky trailing magnesium fire - and the lights never went out. No one knows for certain why. The crew may have been caught up in the spectacle, the signal may have been crossed, or Locklear, staring into the blinding arcs, may have had no visual reference at all. The cue never came, and he flew the spinning Jenny straight into an oil sump at the edge of the field. Locklear and Elliott were both killed instantly. Locklear was 28.

The studio released the film anyway, advertising the real death footage - and audiences lined up around the block.

Why Ormer Locklear Still Matters

Everything Locklear did aloft proved a single point: a human being could move around on and between airplanes in flight, and could pass from one aircraft to another in the air.

That idea echoes through modern aviation - air-to-air refueling, every tanker passing a boom to a fighter, parachute testing, and the work of stunt coordinators and aerial cameramen today. All of it traces back to a Texas bricklayer who climbed out of a cockpit to fix a radiator cap and decided he liked the view.

The barnstormers are remembered as daredevils, and they were. But they also taught a generation of Americans that the airplane wasn’t only a war machine or a rich man’s toy - it was something that could come to your county fair and take you up for five dollars. Some of the children who watched from those hayfields grew up to fly the mail and to fly the Second World War.

The era was glorious, brief, and bloody. By the late 1920s, the government began writing the rules - minimum altitudes, licenses, airworthiness standards - that ended it. But something went out of the world when the last Jenny was parked in the back of the barn for good.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear (1891–1920) was a Texas bricklayer turned Army flight instructor who became the barnstorming era’s biggest star, billed as the King of the Wing Walkers.
He performed the first live plane-to-plane transfer in history, climbing a rope ladder between two Curtiss Jennys in flight with no net, radio, or reliable parachute.
He died on August 2, 1920, at DeMille Field in Los Angeles, age 28, when the arc lights that were his cue to recover from a filmed night spin were never cut.
Barnstorming was born from surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jennys” and out-of-work pilots after World War I ended in November 1918.
Locklear’s stunts helped prove that people and aircraft could interact in flight - a principle underlying modern air-to-air refueling and aerial cinematography.