Ormer Locklear, the Wing Walker From Fort Worth, and the Hollywood Night That Killed the Greatest Showman in Barnstorming

Ormer Locklear was the most famous aviator in America in 1919 and 1920 - not for combat, but for walking on the wings of a moving biplane at altitude. He died at 28 years old on August 2, 1920, when studio searchlights blinded him during a filmed night dive at Griffith Park, Los Angeles, in front of a crowd of ten thousand people.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was a carpenter from Fort Worth, Texas, with a reputation for being good with heights and fearless in the way that makes other men nervous. He enlisted in the Army Signal Corps in 1917, at 25 years old, and reported to Kelly Field in San Antonio to learn to fly.

His training aircraft was the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny - a fabric-over-wood biplane powered by either a 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza or a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine. It was simple and slow, but mechanically unreliable. Engines shed parts in flight. Radiator caps loosened. Fuel lines worked free.

Most pilots, when something went wrong, landed. Locklear’s instinct was different.

How Wing Walking Was Born in a Texas Training Field

The first time Locklear climbed out of a moving airplane, nobody asked him to. A radiator cap worked loose on a solo flight over the Texas mesquite, coolant streaming back over the windscreen. Instead of landing, he climbed out of the cockpit, walked forward along the fuselage, tightened the cap, climbed back in, and flew home. He didn’t report it. It was simply the practical solution to the problem.

He did it again. And again. Word spread among cadets. A cadet saw him perched on the wing root adjusting a wire. Another saw him standing on the fuselage at a hundred miles an hour, arms out, perfectly balanced.

His instructors didn’t court-martial him. They watched - with the particular mix of horror and wonder that genuine impossibility produces. Other cadets came to watch. Locklear, being Locklear, started to put on a show.

By the Armistice in November 1918, he had never deployed to France. He had spent the war performing the most dangerous flying in the Air Corps - in a Texas training field - and had become the finest natural aerobatic performer aviation had ever produced.

The Barnstorming Era and What Created It

Locklear mustered out in early 1919 into a country awash in surplus. The Army was selling Curtiss Jennies for around $200 out of War Assets depots. Thousands of trained veterans could fly but had nowhere particular to go.

The barnstorming era grew from three things: tens of thousands of trained pilots, thousands of surplus biplanes, and a rural American public that had never seen an aircraft in person. A barnstormer could fly into a farm town, land in a field, charge a dollar or two a head for a five-minute hop, and earn a living. The ones who really drew the crowds were the ones who could do something in the air that stopped the heart - loops, rolls, inverted passes low enough to knock hats off the front row.

Locklear was already past all of that.

The Act That Made Him Famous Coast to Coast

His first professional appearance was in the spring of 1919, and the act he arrived with wouldn’t be equaled for decades.

He would climb from the cockpit in flight, walk to the wingtip, stand with arms spread, hang from the landing gear. Then came the move that made him a household name: the mid-air aircraft transfer.

His partner was Milton “Skeets” Elliott, who flew a second Jenny in tight formation - close enough that Locklear could step from one aircraft’s wing to the other, drop from one landing gear and catch the other, or hang from a rope strung between two planes moving at seventy miles an hour over a crowd of farmers and their children.

Women in the front row covered their eyes. Then opened them. They could not not look.

By fall of 1919, Locklear was the most famous aviator in America - ahead of Eddie Rickenbacker, ahead of every decorated combat ace of the Lafayette Escadrille. He was a carpenter from Fort Worth who had taught himself to walk on wings. Viola Dana, a well-known silent film actress, trained with Locklear and performed her own wing walking, expanding the spectacle and proving the act was learnable.

Hollywood Signs the Wing Walker

Universal Pictures signed Locklear in the fall of 1919 to make The Great Air Robbery - a five-reel silent picture about postal bandits and aerial chases. The plot was thin as rice paper. Nobody cared about the plot.

Locklear and Elliott performed every stunt live, with cameras mounted on a chase plane twenty feet away. No wirework. No trick photography. Just Locklear at four thousand feet, moving between airplanes over Southern California. The film sold out theaters. Critics who had never paid much attention to stunt films wrote about the aerial sequences with genuine awe.

Universal immediately signed him to a second picture: The Skywayman.

The Night the Searchlights Killed Him

Production on The Skywayman began in the spring of 1920. By late July, one sequence remained: the climax. A nighttime dive, filmed before a live crowd.

The plan was straightforward. Locklear would climb to altitude after dark. Studio searchlights would find the aircraft. He would push into a vertical dive, pull out at five hundred feet, and the cameras would have the shot.

What no one had fully accounted for was what searchlights do to a pilot inside a cockpit at night. When carbon arc lights hit the aircraft, reflections off the windscreen and wings flood the cockpit with light. The pilot cannot see the horizon. Cannot read the altimeter. Cannot see anything outside the cone of light surrounding him.

Locklear had thousands of hours of flying. He had rehearsed every move he ever performed. Transfers between aircraft were practiced at low altitude before being taken to show altitude. Nothing he did was improvised.

But he had never practiced a night dive into searchlights.

On the night of August 2, 1920, Locklear and Elliott took off from the field at Griffith Park. The crowd of ten thousand watched the searchlights find the Jenny at altitude. Watched it roll into the dive. Watched it come down.

It did not pull out. The aircraft hit the ground at full power. Both men died on impact. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old.

What Universal Did With the Footage

The cameras were rolling. Universal used the footage.

In the final release of The Skywayman, the crash is the film’s final scene. The studio added title cards informing audiences they were watching the actual death of the film’s star. Some theaters refused to show it. Most did not.

Fort Worth buried Locklear on August 7, 1920. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets. The governor of Texas attended. Flowers arrived from every corner of the country. It was not the mourning of a military hero or a political figure - it was the mourning of a performer, which is a different kind of grief: more personal, more immediate.

Why This Matters for Pilots

The story of Locklear’s death is often framed as a cautionary tale about recklessness. It wasn’t recklessness. He was methodical. He trained everything he performed.

He died because of one unanticipated sensory input: searchlights destroying his night vision at the exact moment he needed altitude awareness. That is a story about the limits of preparation, not its absence - the same story as spatial disorientation, inadvertent IMC, or any accident where a competent pilot encounters the one scenario they hadn’t specifically trained for.

Any pilot who has ever been surprised by an instrument reading that contradicted what the seat of their pants was telling them understands exactly what happened in that Jenny on August 2, 1920. The world stopped making sense for just long enough.

The Scale of What Barnstormers Built

The barnstorming era lasted roughly from 1919 to 1926, when the Air Commerce Act brought the first federal regulation to American aviation. In those seven years, aviation historian Don Dwiggins estimated that 85 million Americans saw their first airplane at a barnstorm - in a country of 105 million people.

Those numbers explain why the following generation was genuinely passionate about aviation. Every passenger who paid a dollar to climb into a Jenny’s front cockpit in 1922 was a potential commercial aviation customer in 1930. Every child who watched a loop from a cornfield fence went home and drew airplanes until the pencil wore out.

Most barnstormers were not Locklears. Most were veterans trying to make a living with the only skill the war had left them - five-dollar hops, splitting the take with the farmer who owned the field, sleeping under the wing, moving on Monday morning. Many died quietly, in fog and mechanical failure, with no cameras and no crowd.

But they built something. Locklear just showed them what was possible.

Key Takeaways

Locklear developed wing walking not as a performance but as a practical in-flight maintenance technique during Army training at Kelly Field, San Antonio, beginning in 1917.
By fall 1919, he was America’s most famous aviator - ahead of every combat ace - through barnstorming performances featuring mid-air aircraft transfers with partner Skeets Elliott.
Universal Pictures signed him for two films: The Great Air Robbery (1919) and The Skywayman (1920), both featuring live, unscripted aerial stunts with no wirework or trick photography.
Locklear died on August 2, 1920, when studio searchlights blinded him during a filmed night dive. His death was captured on camera and used in the final film. He was 28.
Historian Don Dwiggins estimated 85 million Americans - out of a national population of 105 million - witnessed aviation firsthand during the barnstorming era (1919–1926), creating the public appetite that powered commercial aviation’s growth in the decades that followed.