Ormer Locklear, the Wing-Walker Who Invented Barnstorming, and the Night Hollywood Filmed His Last Dive

Ormer Locklear pioneered aerial barnstorming in the summer of 1919, transforming postwar surplus airplanes into a national spectacle that introduced millions of ordinary Americans to flight for the first time. In less than two years, he went from climbing out on a biplane wing over a Texas training field to starring in Hollywood motion pictures - and then, on August 2, 1920, he flew a nighttime spiral dive into a floodlit field in Los Angeles and did not pull out.

How World War I Created the Barnstorming Era

When World War I ended in November 1918, the U.S. Army Air Service had trained not hundreds but thousands of pilots. These young men mustered out in civilian clothes with no airplane, no job, and a skill set that had almost no peacetime market.

At the same time, the government was liquidating its wartime aviation inventory. Curtiss Jenny biplanes - the standard trainer that had gotten most of those pilots airborne - were selling for as little as $200 to $300. Sometimes as much as $1,000. Either way, for the first time in history, a working pilot could afford to own an airplane.

The result was inevitable. Pilots fanned out across the country, landed in farm fields and city parks, and charged a dollar a head for ten-minute rides. They buzzed small towns to draw a crowd, found the nearest flat field, and set up shop. The term “barnstorming” came from exactly what it sounds like.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in October 1891 in Eastland, Texas. He was 25 years old when he enlisted after America entered the war in 1917. Stationed at Barron Field near Fort Worth, he proved to be a natural - the kind of pilot who feels what an airplane is doing rather than just reading instruments.

He was assigned to the Curtiss Jenny, a forgiving, slow-speed trainer that was ideal for beginners. But the Jenny had one notorious flaw: the radiator cap on the forward engine had a tendency to work loose in flight. Lose your coolant at altitude, and you were going down.

The standard solution was to land. Locklear had a different idea.

The Wing Walk That Started Everything

On a training flight over West Texas, Locklear noticed the radiator cap starting to work loose. Instead of breaking off to land, he climbed out of the cockpit, crawled forward on the fuselage while his partner held the controls, tightened the cap, and climbed back in. In flight. At altitude. On a biplane doing approximately 60 miles per hour.

His partner nearly had a heart attack. When they landed, the story spread around Barron Field in ten minutes.

Locklear noticed the way men looked at him afterward - the same expression you see at a rodeo when something happens that should not be possible. He had found his thing. He started climbing out on the wing on purpose, just to watch the reaction on the ground. His instructors were unsure what to make of him. Military aviation required discipline and conformity; what Locklear was doing was neither. But he was also the most naturally gifted pilot on the field, and no one quite had the nerve to ground him for being extraordinary.

Building the Barnstorming Template

When Locklear mustered out in the fall of 1918, he partnered with Milton Elliott, a pilot he had trained with and trusted, and a third man named Shirley Short. They pooled enough money for a pair of surplus Jennies and began working the small towns of Texas and Oklahoma.

Within weeks they had developed what became the standard barnstorming template. Arrive over a town low enough to be heard. Circle until a crowd gathers. Identify a flat field nearby. Land. By the time the aircraft were tied down, farmers, merchants, and children were already walking across the fields toward them.

Locklear would open with a flying demonstration - loops, low passes, steep banks that brought the wingtip close enough to the ground to make the crowd flinch. Then he would climb out of the cockpit and walk the wing, and every person in that field would forget everything else they had ever seen.

The Signature Stunt: The Airplane-to-Airplane Transfer

Locklear kept pushing beyond the wing walk. The maneuver that set him apart from every other pilot in the country was what he called the transfer.

Elliott and Short would fly two Jennies in close formation - roughly ten feet between wingtips. Locklear would stand on the lower wing of one aircraft and, at the right moment, step across the gap to the other. Not jump. Step. As if crossing between two rowboats tied at a dock, except the platform was moving at 60 miles per hour with nothing beneath it but open sky.

The first time he performed it in front of a crowd, the reaction stopped the show. Multiple period accounts describe spectators dropping to their knees. By the spring of 1919, Locklear was drawing newspaper coverage across the region. People in Kansas City knew who he was before he arrived in Kansas City.

Why Barnstorming Mattered Beyond the Spectacle

The relationship between aviation and American culture in 1919 was unique and unrepeatable. Powered flight was still, in practical terms, a miracle. The Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk had been only 16 years earlier - within living memory of most adults standing in those fields. Most people in rural America had never seen an airplane up close, let alone ridden in one.

What Locklear and the barnstormers were doing was not just entertainment. Every ride they sold was someone’s first contact with the concept that a human being could leave the ground. They were introducing the idea of flight to millions of people who had no other way to encounter it.

Hollywood paid attention.

Locklear Goes to Hollywood

Universal Pictures sent a representative to watch Locklear work in the summer of 1919. The offer that came back was serious money. Universal wanted to build an entire film around his aerial stunts - he would star in it and perform all the aerials himself, no doubles, no camera tricks.

The film was The Great Air Robbery, released as a serial picture in late 1919. Chapter by chapter, week by week, audiences followed the story of a government agent chasing criminals across the sky. What they saw in the aerial sequences was not movie magic. It was Locklear on the wing, doing exactly what he had been doing over county fairgrounds, now captured from multiple camera angles for the whole country to watch.

The Great Air Robbery was a substantial hit. Universal moved immediately on a second picture: The Skywayman. Bigger budget. More dangerous sequences.

By the summer of 1920, Locklear was 28 years old and one of the most famous men in America. He was engaged to film actress Viola Dana, whom he had met through Universal, and was already talking about what stunts he hadn’t yet tried.

August 2, 1920: The Night the Floodlights Failed Him

The Skywayman had wrapped most of its production through spring and early summer. The climactic scene was saved for last. It required a nighttime spiral dive: Locklear would take the aircraft up in full darkness, cut the engine, and spiral down toward a field illuminated by floodlights on the ground. The drama of the shot would come from the lights catching the spinning aircraft against the black sky.

On the night of August 2, 1920, at a field in Los Angeles, cameras rolled. Locklear and Elliott took off at dusk and circled until it was fully dark. Then they began the spiral.

Witnesses on the ground described the first part of the descent as controlled and deliberate - exactly what the director had asked for. The aircraft came down tight and steep, catching the floodlights in quick flashes as it rotated.

It did not pull out. It hit the ground and caught fire. Both men died on impact.

The Aviation Lesson That Killed Ormer Locklear

The investigation concluded what any pilot hearing that setup would already suspect. The floodlights required for the cameras blinded both pilots on the way down. They were flying in complete darkness with no instrument reference for altitude, relying entirely on their visual picture of the field below. When the lights came up bright in their faces, that visual picture was gone. The ground came up before they knew it was close.

It is one of the oldest lessons in aviation. The instrument that saves your life is the one that tells you where you are when your eyes cannot. Locklear had no such instrument that night. He had his vision, and his vision was taken from him at the worst possible moment.

He had been barnstorming professionally for less than two years.

Locklear’s Legacy and the Era He Built

What Locklear built in those two years matters more than how it finished. He invented a tradition that swept across America through the 1920s. The great flying circuses that toured hundreds of cities, the wing-walkers and parachutists and mid-air transfers that packed fairgrounds from Maine to California - all of it had roots in what Locklear started at Barron Field when he climbed out on that wing to fix a leaking radiator cap.

The Ivan Gates Flying Circus, one of the most prominent operations of the decade, employed dozens of pilots and performers. Clyde Pangborn flew for the Gates circus before becoming the first man to fly non-stop across the Pacific Ocean. These were not casual daredevils. They were professional aviators who had learned from what Locklear established.

The era ended practically with the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which required pilots to be licensed and aircraft to be certified. Most barnstormers either came into compliance or faded out. The frontier quality that had defined the movement became harder to sustain under regulation.

The accident rate among barnstormers had been genuinely frightening, and oversight was overdue. But something real had been accomplished. Those pilots put aviation in front of ordinary Americans in a way that nothing else was doing. Commercial air service in the early 1920s was expensive, rare, and not yet part of everyday life. What the barnstormers gave people was not transportation - it was imagination.

The Skywayman still exists, preserved in film archives. In it are those floodlights, that spiral, and the last few seconds of the most extraordinary two-year run in the early history of American aviation.

The definitive biography is Art Ronnie’s Locklear: The Man Who Walked on Wings. Smithsonian Air and Space magazine has also covered this period in barnstorming history in depth.

Key Takeaways

• Ormer Locklear was born in Eastland, Texas in 1891 and learned to fly at Barron Field near Fort Worth during WWI. His first wing walk was an improvised fix for a loose radiator cap - not a stunt.
• The barnstorming boom of 1919–1926 was directly enabled by two postwar conditions: thousands of trained pilots and surplus Curtiss Jennies selling for as little as $200–$300.
• Locklear’s signature “transfer” - stepping between two aircraft flying in formation at 60 mph - had never been done before and made him a national figure within months.
• He died on August 2, 1920, during filming of The Skywayman. Ground-level floodlights required by the cameras destroyed his visual altitude reference during a night spiral dive. There were no flight instruments that could have saved him.
• The barnstorming era Locklear pioneered ended with the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which mandated pilot licensing and aircraft certification. By then, millions of Americans had experienced flight for the first time because of it.