Ormer Locklear - The Wing Walker Who Invented the Barnstorming Era One Step at a Time

The decade between the Wright Brothers and Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing is often treated as a gap in aviation history. It wasn’t. Between 1903 and 1927, an entire popular culture around flight was built from the ground up - and one man from Greenville, Texas did more to create it than almost anyone else.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Ormer Leslie Locklear was born in 1891 in Greenville, Texas, into a working-class family. He grew up with mechanical confidence - fixing car engines, framing roofs, climbing water towers without hesitation. Heights and machinery were simply part of his world.

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Locklear enlisted and was assigned to Barron Field, an Army Air Service primary training installation outside Fort Worth. He had a gift for flying and became an instructor.

The Radiator Cap That Invented Wing Walking

One afternoon in 1917, Locklear was flying solo in a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny - the gentle, forgiving two-seat biplane that trained an entire generation of American military pilots. The Jenny was powered by a 100-horsepower OX-5 engine and cruised at roughly 75 miles per hour.

A radiator cap came loose. In an OX-5, that was a real problem: coolant bleeding into the slipstream meant engine seizure and a forced landing.

Locklear didn’t land. He throttled back to a stable cruise, pushed himself out of the cockpit, crawled forward along the fuselage, reached past the engine cowling, and retightened the cap while the aircraft flew itself. Then he climbed back in and landed normally.

His commanding officer was waiting on the field - somewhere between furious and speechless. No regulations specifically prohibited what Locklear had done. The Army Air Service had simply never anticipated it.

The Engineering Mind Behind the Act

Locklear was not reckless in the conventional sense. He was methodical - an engineer’s mind in a daredevil’s body. When he looked at a Curtiss Jenny in flight, he saw a structure: a lattice of spruce, wire, and fabric moving through air at modest speed.

He calculated - correctly - that at the slow airspeeds the Jenny flew, aerodynamic forces were stable enough for a man to move around on the airframe without upsetting it.

He tested that theory systematically. First sitting on the fuselage. Then crawling onto the top wing. Then standing. Then walking to the wingtip and back. He studied how his weight shifted the aircraft’s behavior and learned what the airplane would and wouldn’t tolerate. He was, in the most literal sense, doing flight testing from the outside of the aircraft.

From Barron Field to the County Fairground

Word spread around the base. Other instructors began wing walking competitively. Then Locklear escalated: two Jennies in close formation, one above and slightly ahead of the other. Locklear would climb from the lower aircraft up the struts, reach for the landing gear axle of the upper aircraft as it passed overhead, and swing himself across into the upper cockpit.

A plane-to-plane transfer. In flight. At altitude.

It required absolute precision from both pilots and timing that could not be rehearsed in any conventional way - and Locklear’s partner had to hold formation while Locklear hung between the two aircraft, fully committed to his physics calculations being correct.

How a $50 Airplane Created a National Phenomenon

When World War I ended in November 1918, the Army Air Service had enormous quantities of surplus aircraft and a generation of newly discharged pilots with nowhere to go. Curtiss Jennies that had cost the government nearly $10,000 to build sold for as little as $50 - not a figure of speech, actual dollars in an era when a new Ford touring car cost around $350.

Returning pilots bought those Jennies and became barnstormers. They flew into counties, negotiated with farmers for use of a pasture, and sold two-dollar rides to locals who had never left the ground. A county fair in town meant a larger crowd, which meant a better show, which meant more money to move on to the next county.

Locklear had something the average barnstormer didn’t: a show that placed him in an entirely different category. He teamed up with two Barron Field colleagues - pilot Shirley Short and pilot-mechanic “Skeets” Elliott - and built an aerial act that ran nearly 45 minutes and included plane-to-plane mid-air transfers, car-to-plane rope ladder pickups, parachute jumps, and sustained inverted flight.

At county fairgrounds across the Midwest, audiences watched Locklear step off one moving airplane and onto another. The sound a crowd makes when it sees something impossible happen directly overhead - not quite a cheer, not quite a scream - was something Locklear could produce reliably.

Hollywood Signs the Wing Walker

In 1919, Universal Pictures signed Locklear to star in The Great Air Robbery - a feature film built around real aerial sequences with no trick photography. The concept was straightforward: put a real pilot doing genuinely impossible things close enough to the camera that audiences could see his face. No cutaways.

The film was a massive hit. Audiences who had heard of barnstorming could now watch it in close detail on a theater screen. Universal immediately signed Locklear for a second picture: The Skywayman.

The Night of August 2, 1920

Production on The Skywayman moved quickly. The final major sequence required a night aerial scene over Los Angeles, with flares mounted on the Jenny’s wingtips and arc floodlights on the ground. The shot called for a spiral dive toward the cameras, pulling out at low altitude, and flying off into the dark.

The spiral became steeper than it should have.

Some witnesses believed the floodlights blinded the crew on the descent. In a night spiral pointed toward your own light source, there is a moment when you are looking almost directly into the lamps - and that may have coincided with the moment the pullout needed to begin.

The Jenny struck an oil field outside Los Angeles at approximately 9:15 PM on August 2, 1920. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old. Skeets Elliott died alongside him.

Universal released The Skywayman two months later. They used the crash footage. Audiences watched Locklear’s final seconds projected on the screen, and didn’t know until they read the program that the pilot spiraling down through the flares was already gone.

The True Cost of the Barnstorming Era

Locklear was skilled and systematic - but the margin was genuinely narrow in 1920. The OX-5 engine failed regularly under the best conditions. Wing fabric tore unpredictably. Landing fields had hidden ditches and fence posts. Weather forecasting was essentially nonexistent.

Between 1919 and 1926 - the period historians consider the peak of American barnstorming - estimates suggest more than 800 pilots were killed in aerobatic accidents and exhibition crashes. That number excludes mechanics, wing walkers, parachutists, and passengers who also didn’t come home.

The Federal Aviation Act of 1926 - the legislative foundation for what would eventually become the FAA - was passed in part because Congress had spent years watching the barnstorming era and concluded that pilot licensing, aircraft certification, and rules for public exhibitions had to come under control. The regulatory framework of modern American aviation has its roots, at least partly, in the wreckage left by a decade of men and women selling rides out of pastures.

What the Barnstormers Actually Built

The regulatory argument is straightforward. The cultural argument is more important.

Before the barnstormers, flight was an abstraction for most Americans - something the Wright Brothers had done somewhere in North Carolina, reported in newspapers, remote and theoretical. The barnstormers landed in the field behind the hardware store. They flew low enough, and slow enough, and close enough, that a ten-year-old standing in a wheat field could look up and watch a man walk across a moving wing in the open sky and feel something permanently rearrange in their understanding of what was possible.

The children who stood in those fairground crowds in the early 1920s were in cockpits over the Pacific fifteen years later. Some became the engineers who designed the aircraft that won the war. The trajectory of American aviation runs, in a direct line, through those afternoons at county fairs.

Locklear’s name doesn’t carry the same reach as Lindbergh’s - and the contrast is instructive. Lindbergh was the clean, famous, triumphant future of organized and celebrated aviation. Locklear was the raw present tense of 1920: unregulated, exhilarating, and genuinely mortal. He operated before the paperwork, before the medical certificate, before anyone had thought to write down rules for what you were and weren’t allowed to do with a fifty-dollar airplane over a pasture in Texas.

The loose radiator cap was the beginning of all of it - a practical problem solved with available tools by a man who looked at a moving aircraft and saw, simply, something that needed fixing.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear (1891–1920) invented wing walking in 1917 as a practical maintenance solution - climbing out of a moving Curtiss Jenny to retighten a loose radiator cap - and transformed it into America’s first aviation spectacle.
Post-WWI military surplus put Curtiss Jennies on the market for as little as $50, enabling hundreds of discharged pilots to become barnstormers and bring flight directly to rural American communities.
Locklear approached aerial stunt work as an engineering discipline, systematically studying how the Jenny responded to external weight distribution before developing public performances.
More than 800 pilots died in barnstorming accidents between 1919 and 1926, directly contributing to the Federal Aviation Act of 1926 and the regulatory foundations of what became the FAA.
The barnstorming era created the popular aviation culture that produced the next generation of military pilots, aeronautical engineers, and flight instructors - the human infrastructure that defined 20th-century American flight.