Ormer Locklear, the King of the Wing Walkers, and the Texas Lieutenant Who Climbed Out of the Cockpit and Never Really Came Back

Ormer Locklear was a U.S. Army lieutenant and aviation daredevil who invented wing walking and the mid-air “plane change,” becoming the most famous stunt flyer of the early barnstorming era. After learning to fly the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” during World War I, he turned climbing out onto a moving airplane’s wing into a national art form. He died on August 2, 1920, at age 28, filming a night stunt for the movie The Skywayman in Los Angeles.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Locklear was a Fort Worth, Texas native who, long before he ever saw an airplane, was already climbing water towers and walking the ridgepoles of barns for the thrill of it. When the United States entered the Great War in 1917 and the Army needed thousands of pilots, he enlisted, trained at Barron Field in Texas, and pinned on his wings as a lieutenant.

He was handsome, fearless, and utterly unafraid of the one place most pilots feared: the open air outside the cockpit.

What Airplane Did Locklear Fly?

The Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” was the trainer at the center of the story. It was a biplane built of wood, wire, and doped fabric, powered by a 90-horsepower engine that shook the whole airframe. It stalled at around 45 miles per hour and cruised barely faster than a Model T.

The Jenny was slow, gentle, and forgiving - which is exactly why what Locklear did next was survivable. Its open cockpit and low speeds gave a man just enough margin to climb out into the wind and live.

How Did Wing Walking Begin?

The first wing walk was an act of mid-air repair, not showmanship. During a training flight, something worked loose on the top wing of Locklear’s Jenny. Instead of writing it up on the ground, he unbuckled, climbed out onto the wing in a 60-mile-per-hour wind, fixed the problem with his bare hands, and climbed back in.

The Army did not court-martial him. Instead, officers realized that student pilots were terrified of in-flight failures - and here was a cadet who could physically prove that a man could get out on the wing, deal with a problem, and survive. Locklear was allowed to perform wing walks officially, as a training demonstration.

The more he did it, the more he refined it. He learned how to lean into the wind so it held him up, which wires were strong enough to grab, and how to walk from cockpit to wingtip while another pilot flew straight and level. Working with pilot Milton Elliott and fellow stuntman Shirley Short, he built an entire vocabulary of aerial stunts no one had seen before.

Why Did Barnstorming Explode After World War I?

The Armistice of November 1918 left the country with two things in enormous surplus: thousands of trained pilots with nothing to fly, and thousands of surplus Jennys the Army no longer needed, sold off for a few hundred dollars apiece - some still in the crate.

Cheap airplanes, fearless pilots, and a public that had never seen an airplane up close became the spark for the entire barnstorming era. Locklear got out of the Army and took his act on the road, essentially inventing the template every other performer would copy for the next fifteen years.

What Did a Locklear Air Show Look Like?

Picture a summer afternoon in 1919 in a small Kansas or Nebraska town. A pilot buzzes low over Main Street until the whole town spills outside, and standing on the wing - arms out, coat flapping - is a man. The airplane would land in a farmer’s pasture, and half the county would climb the fences to look.

Locklear charged a dollar, sometimes five, to take locals up for their first-ever airplane ride around the pattern. Once he’d drawn the crowd, he gave them the show. He would climb to roughly 2,000 feet (sometimes far lower), hand the controls to Elliott, unbuckle, and go to work:

Standing on the wingtip
Hanging from the landing gear by his knees, upside down, waving at the crowd
Standing on the top wing held by nothing but the wind and his own nerve

What Was the Mid-Air Plane Change?

The plane change was the stunt that made Locklear a legend. Two Jennys flew in tight formation, one above the other. Locklear would climb out of the lower airplane, up onto its top wing, reach up to grab a rope ladder dangling from the upper airplane, and transfer hand over hand - in open air, hundreds of feet up, with no parachute - from one moving airplane to another.

There was no radio between the two aircraft. It was all hand signals and trust. The pilots had to hold formation so smoothly that a man hanging in the wind between them wasn’t thrown off. One gust, one overcorrection, one dropped nose, and Locklear would have been the next morning’s headline. He did it town after town, and the crowds went wild because no one was sure they’d see him survive.

Why Do the Barnstormers Matter?

It’s easy today, in an age of glass cockpits and envelope protection, to dismiss the daredevils as fools with a death wish. But the barnstormers took the airplane off the front page as a weapon of war and put it in front of ordinary Americans as something wonderful.

A farm kid in Nebraska who paid a dollar to feel the ground drop away might have grown up to build airplanes, fly the mail, or design the airliners we ride today. Barnstormers sold the dream - the same dream that has a student pilot sweating through pattern work at your home field this weekend, chasing the exact feeling Locklear sold for a dollar a ride.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

Hollywood came calling because it always does. Locklear starred in The Great Air Robbery (1919), doing his own stunts, and became a genuine motion picture star within about two years of fixing that wing in mid-air.

He died filming his second picture, The Skywayman. On the night of August 2, 1920, at DeMille Field in Los Angeles, the crew shot a dramatic scene in which Locklear’s Jenny spun down toward oil derricks lit by enormous arc searchlights, engine screaming, to pull out at the last second.

The plan Locklear and Elliott had worked out was simple: the searchlights would be cut off as the pullout began - that was their signal to level off and climb away in the dark. They put the Jenny into the dive, spinning out of the black sky with cameras rolling. The lights never went off. Blinded by the arc lights, with no artificial horizon and nothing to tell them which way was up, the two men never pulled out. Ormer Locklear and Milton Elliott were both killed instantly. Locklear was 28 years old.

The cameras captured the crash, and the studio left it in the film. The Skywayman premiered just weeks later, and audiences watched Locklear die without most of them realizing what they were seeing.

How Did Barnstorming Deaths Shape Aviation Law?

The barnstorming frontier had no rulebook. There was no Federal Aviation Administration, no regulation, no minimum altitude, and no requirement that a wing walker wear a parachute. The frontier collected its due.

The sheer number of barnstorming casualties through the early 1920s helped push the country toward the Air Commerce Act of 1926 - the first real rules of the sky, covering licensing, aircraft standards, and minimum altitudes over towns. In a grim way, every barnstormer who crashed helped write the first line of a regulation that keeps modern pilots alive.

Locklear’s Legacy

Ormer Locklear flew for only about three years, from pinning on his wings to that oil derrick in Los Angeles. Yet in that short time he took a single idea - that a man could leave the safety of the cockpit and dance on the wing - and turned it into an American art form.

Every wing walker who thrills a crowd atop a Stearman at Oshkosh or Sun ’n Fun today is walking in his footprints. He was the first. He wrote the book, paid the highest price for it, and left the door wide open behind him.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking, beginning with a real in-flight repair of his Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” during WWI training at Barron Field, Texas.
The mid-air plane change - transferring between two moving biplanes via a rope ladder with no parachute - was his signature stunt and made him the “King of the Wing Walkers.”
Surplus Jennys and thousands of jobless pilots after the 1918 Armistice ignited the barnstorming era, which introduced flight to small-town America.
Locklear died on August 2, 1920, at age 28, when searchlights failed to cut off during a night stunt for The Skywayman; the crash was filmed and left in the movie.
Barnstorming casualties helped drive the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the foundation of modern U.S. aviation regulation.