Ormer Locklear, the Texas Carpenter Who Invented Wing-Walking, and the Night Dive Over Los Angeles That Killed the Most Famous Barnstormer in America

Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1917 not as a planned stunt, but as a practical response to a rattling radiator cap - and in doing so, ignited the barnstorming era that brought aviation to millions of Americans who had never stood next to an airplane. He was 28 years old when he died on August 2, 1920, spiraling into a California field while the cameras of Universal Pictures were still rolling.

A Carpenter from Greenville, Texas

Ormer Leslie Locklear was 25 years old when the Army Signal Corps offered him a chance to fly in 1917. He had grown up watching early aviators at Texas county fairs, pressing against rope lines at exhibitions, running toward the sound of engines. When the war came, he didn’t hesitate.

He trained at Barron Field near Fort Worth, learning to fly the Curtiss JN-4 - universally called the Jenny. He became an instructor there, patient with students and genuinely at home in the airplane in the way that distinguished certain pilots from everyone else.

The Rattling Radiator Cap That Started Everything

The Curtiss Jenny had a design quirk. The radiator cap on the engine cowling worked itself loose in flight. When it did, coolant escaped, and a Jenny without coolant was an airplane with a serious problem.

The standard solution - if you had a passenger in the front cockpit - was to send him forward. The pilot held a stable attitude, throttled back, and the man in the front seat climbed out, moved along the fuselage, and tightened the cap.

Flying solo one day in 1917, Locklear’s cap started rattling. He climbed out of the rear cockpit and did it himself. At two thousand feet. With the propeller turning. He didn’t treat it as a near-death experience. He treated it as information.

He told his fellow pilots. They didn’t believe him. So he did it again - on purpose, with witnesses.

What the Curtiss Jenny Made Possible

The Jenny was the right airplane for what Locklear was discovering. A two-seat biplane with fabric-over-spruce construction and a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine, it cruised at 60 mph and landed at 45 mph. That engine produced roughly the power of a modern riding lawn mower - but in a light enough airframe that a man on the wing didn’t necessarily doom the aircraft.

The cockpit smelled like castor oil, hot metal, and doped fabric. At 60 mph, the slipstream was not gentle - just a pair of goggles and a leather helmet between the pilot and the wind. No hydraulics. Just cables, pulleys, and direct feedback from the sky through the controls.

That directness was part of what made wing-walking possible. Locklear understood, instinctively, that the Jenny in level flight with the throttle eased back would stay stable long enough for a careful man to move along it.

Building a Routine at Barron Field

Word spread the way interesting things spread on military bases: fast and with embellishment. Some officers were not pleased. The enlisted men loved it.

Locklear brought in two partners: Lieutenant Milton “Skeets” Elliott, slender, quick, and fearless, and Lieutenant James Sloan. The three of them began systematically working out what was possible - not recklessly, but methodically, treating the airplane as a problem to be mapped.

They identified which handholds held and which gave way without warning. They learned how the slipstream differed at different points along the aircraft - where it would press you flat against the fabric and where it would try to throw you clear entirely. They worked out hand and foot signals between the man on the wing and the man in the cockpit, a wordless vocabulary built on mutual trust.

By November 1918, when the war ended, Locklear and Elliott had developed a full repertoire: transfers between two aircraft in flight, moving from one Jenny to another while both were airborne; hanging by rope ladders from the landing gear; lying flat on the upper wing through a loop with nothing holding them but grip and nerve.

The Barnstorming Circuit

The postwar economy made barnstorming practical almost overnight. The government had thousands of surplus Jennies it no longer needed. A pilot who knew the right people could buy one for a few hundred dollars.

Locklear, Elliott, and a rotating cast of daredevils formed a troupe and worked the country. The formula was simple: land in a farmer’s field, get the local paper to run a notice, charge a quarter to watch and a dollar or two for a ride. Split the take. Move on.

The crowds were enormous. Farmers drove in from ten miles out. Shop owners closed for the afternoon. Children climbed fenceposts for a better view. Locklear understood showmanship instinctively - he knew the value of the pause before the payoff, the ten seconds of held breath that made the crowd feel the danger before the stunt arrived.

More than that, he understood what made it work: it was real. Not an illusion. A man, actually on the wing, actually in the air, held by grip and balance and nothing else. The crowd could feel the difference. You always can.

Hollywood and the Authentic Stunt

The film industry in 1919 was hungry for images that couldn’t be faked. Universal Pictures offered Locklear a contract, and he made “The Great Air Robbery” - a stolen-airmail thriller whose flying sequences were entirely authentic. No camera tricks. No process shots. Locklear performed in the actual sky, cameras on the ground caught all of it, and audiences in theaters from coast to coast watched things happen in real air that they could not quite believe were possible.

The film was a success. Universal wanted a second picture.

The Night Dive Over Los Angeles

Locklear called the second film “The Skywayman.” Production began in the summer of 1920.

The climactic sequence called for a nighttime dive - the airplane spiraling down out of a dark California sky, searchlights sweeping up to find it as it descended. They scheduled the shoot for August 2, 1920, at a field near Los Angeles.

Camera crews set up on the ground. Searchlight operators took their positions. Locklear and Skeets Elliott climbed into their Jenny, ran the engine up in the dark, and taxied out.

They climbed. They dove.

The searchlights found them as they came down. What happened next depends on the witness. Some said the beams blinded Locklear - that descending in the spiral with the lights full in his eyes, he lost the horizon and lost his reference until the ground was too close to matter. Others said the dive was simply too low, the speed built in the descent leaving no altitude for recovery.

Ormer Locklear and Skeets Elliott died in that field on August 2, 1920. Locklear was 28 years old. The cameras were still rolling when the aircraft hit the ground.

Universal released The Skywayman anyway. The film drew enormous crowds.

Why Locklear’s Legacy Matters in Aviation

The barnstorming era Locklear helped create continued for fifteen years after his death. The stunts he worked out at Barron Field became standard features of traveling air shows throughout the decade. But the spectacle was only part of the story.

Barnstormers were landing in places a hundred miles from the nearest city and putting an airplane directly in front of people who had never stood next to one. They were offering rides, and tens of thousands of Americans climbed into a Jenny because someone landed near their town.

Charles Lindbergh barnstormed before he ever considered the Atlantic. Jimmy Doolittle’s love of flying traces to air shows he watched as a boy. Amelia Earhart took her first airplane ride in a barnstormer’s Jenny and earned her license within six months.

Some of those passengers became pilots. Some became engineers. Some just became people who looked up for the rest of their lives whenever they heard an engine overhead.

The Curtiss Jenny now sits quiet in museums, the fabric faded, the OX-5 cold behind glass. If you ever find yourself standing next to one, look at how small it is. Look at the thin fabric stretched over those wooden ribs. Look at the open cockpit with the little wind deflector that did almost nothing against 60 mph of slipstream.

A carpenter from Greenville, Texas climbed out onto that wing at two thousand feet because the radiator cap was loose - and discovered that the air, if you were careful enough, would hold you.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1917 at Barron Field, Texas - not as a planned stunt but as a practical fix for a mechanical problem on a solo flight
• The Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” - fabric-over-spruce, 90 HP OX-5 engine, 60 mph cruise - was stable enough in level flight to make early aerial acrobatics survivable
• Locklear and his partner Milton “Skeets” Elliott died together on August 2, 1920, filming a night dive sequence for Universal Pictures’ The Skywayman
• The barnstorming era Locklear helped launch directly shaped the aviation careers of Lindbergh, Doolittle, and Earhart, among thousands of others
• The barnstormers of the 1920s functioned as the most effective grassroots aviation outreach program in American history - landing where no airport existed and offering rides to anyone with a dollar