Ormer Locklear, the Wing Walker Who Invented the Barnstorming Show, and the Hollywood Night Dive That Killed the Best Act in Aviation

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking not as a performance but as a repair job. In 1918, while training at Kelly Field in San Antonio, he climbed out of the cockpit of a Curtiss Jenny in flight to tighten a loose radiator cap with his bare hands. That single act of practical problem-solving became the foundation of the barnstorming era - and ended, two years later, in a fatal crash staged for a Hollywood film.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Born in Greenville, Texas, in 1891, Locklear was a natural athlete with an intuitive feel for mechanical systems. He enlisted in the Army Air Service in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War and trained at Kelly Field on the Curtiss JN-4 - universally called the Jenny.

The Jenny was the backbone of American flight instruction: a 90-horsepower OX-5 engine, spruce-and-ash framing, fabric-covered wings, wire bracing throughout, and a top speed of roughly 75 mph. It was forgiving, durable, and prone to vibrating loose its smallest hardware in flight.

The Radiator Cap That Started Everything

The exact date has been lost, but sometime in 1918, Locklear was airborne over Kelly Field when his Jenny’s radiator cap worked free. The engine temperature began climbing toward a seizure. He had two options: land immediately, or fix it.

He climbed out of the cockpit, stepped onto the lower wing, walked forward against the full force of the slipstream, and tightened the cap with his bare hands. His student pilot held the stick steady and prayed. The men watching from the flight line went silent - then erupted.

Locklear landed and immediately understood what had just happened. He had felt the electricity from the crowd below, that particular quality of mass attention that occurs when a large group of people all stop breathing at once. He set about building a career from it.

How Locklear Developed the Wing-Walking Routine

Locklear spent months working out the physics systematically. He learned to place his feet along the wing’s rib lines for structural support, distribute his weight to preserve the aircraft’s trim, and communicate with hand signals to the pilot below.

He recruited fellow trainees as chase pilots and developed a full aerial routine. The acts escalated progressively:

Standing on the wing at altitude, learning the slipstream
Walking the full length of the lower wing, then climbing to the top wing
Dropping from a flying aircraft onto the hood of a moving automobile
Hanging from the landing gear by his hands at cruise speed
Transferring between two aircraft in tight formation

That last act was the finale that reliably silenced crowds. Two Jennies flying in close formation. Locklear standing on the top wing of one, the slipstream doing everything it could to remove him from the aircraft, while the second airplane eased alongside to within reaching distance. Then he stepped across. Not a jump - a step, executed over thousands of feet of open farmland.

The Army was uneasy about its aircraft being used as gymnastic equipment, but Locklear kept pointing out that he had not died. They allowed him to continue.

The Post-War Barnstorming Explosion

The war ended in November 1918. The United States had produced more than ten thousand trained military pilots who suddenly had no assignment, and the government held thousands of surplus Jennies in fields and warehouses across the country.

The Army sold them off. Surplus Jennies moved for as little as $200 apiece - sometimes less. Pilots bought them alone or pooled savings with a partner, and the barnstorming era began in earnest.

The model was straightforward: find a flat field on the edge of a small town, make a deal with the farmer, fly a few low passes over the main street to announce your presence, and wait. They always came - families driving twenty miles over dirt roads in Model Ts and farm wagons, people who had read about airplanes for years but never heard one at two hundred feet.

A dollar or two bought a ride around the field. Five dollars got you a solo flight. Some pilots charged extra for loops. Fuel costs ate most of the revenue. Tools spread out on canvas in the field. Fabric patched with whatever was at hand. Some pilots slept under the wings.

Locklear’s Hollywood Career

Word of Locklear’s act reached the film industry quickly. Sound had not come to pictures. Color had not come. The only real special effect available was genuine reality - and Locklear was the most spectacular reality that money could find.

Universal Pictures signed him. His first film, “The Great Air Robbery,” was released in 1919. Every aerial stunt was genuine - no camera tricks, no studio effects. Audiences in dark theaters watched a man walk between aircraft two thousand feet above California. The picture was a sensation. Universal wanted a second film immediately. They called it “The Skywayman.”

The Night Dive at Lincoln Park

For the film’s climax, the director planned a nighttime dive sequence: Locklear and his pilot, Milton “Skeets” Elliott, plunging from altitude toward a crowd below, lit by studio floodlights, filmed from the ground.

Locklear raised the problem directly and clearly. In a nighttime dive, the floodlights would point straight into his eyes at the moment he needed to judge the ground and initiate recovery. He would be blinded. He would have no visual reference for the pullout.

The studio said the signals would be coordinated. Everything would be managed. Trust us.

On August 1, 1920, at Lincoln Park in Los Angeles, the floodlights came on and the aircraft climbed to altitude. The dive began. The lights blinded them completely. Locklear and Elliott never pulled out. The aircraft struck the ground at full throttle, killing both men instantly.

Ormer Locklear was 28 years old. He had been famous for less than two years.

Universal released “The Skywayman” regardless. The crash footage was used in the final cut of the film.

Why Locklear’s Death Didn’t Kill Barnstorming

Locklear’s act had been copied across the country before he died, and it continued long after. Ivan Gates built the Gates Flying Circus into the largest traveling aviation show in the United States, running dozens of pilots and performers out of a single organization. Flying circuses large and small carried forward what Locklear had proven: that aviation could sell itself on spectacle alone, and that ordinary Americans would go out of their way and spend money they did not necessarily have for the chance to see someone defy the sky.

Among the barnstormers working the Midwest in those years was a young pilot who was nearly broke most of the time and sleeping under his wings. His name was Charles Lindbergh. In a few years he would become the most famous aviator who ever lived. In those days, he was just another young man with a Jenny and a willingness to do what frightened other people.

The era wound down through the late 1920s and into the 1930s. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 began requiring pilot licenses and airworthiness certificates. The surplus Jennies were wearing out, their fabric tired and engines exhausted. The Depression eliminated the discretionary income that made a five-dollar ride possible. By the mid-1930s, the great flying circuses were largely history.

Why This Matters for Pilots Today

The barnstorming era created the audience that made commercial aviation economically viable. The children who stood in those dusty fields watching Locklear walk on a wing grew up to become the first airline passengers, the engineers who designed the next generation of aircraft, and the pilots who flew the Second World War.

Locklear’s story also carries a warning that remains current. He knew the floodlights were a hazard. He said so explicitly. He identified the specific failure mode - night blindness at the moment of recovery - with precision. The studio overruled him. The outcome was predictable to anyone willing to listen.

The difference between acceptable risk and unacceptable risk is the ability to identify what you cannot control. Locklear could control his balance, his timing, his pilots. He could not control whether the people managing the production would protect his ability to see the ground.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1918 as a practical solution to a mechanical failure, not as a planned stunt
He and pilot Milton “Skeets” Elliott died on August 1, 1920, in a nighttime film dive that Locklear had explicitly warned the studio was dangerous
Surplus military Jennies sold for as little as $200 after World War I, making the barnstorming era economically possible
The barnstorming movement produced the pilots, engineers, and air-minded public that sustained American aviation through the mid-20th century
Universal Pictures used the crash footage in the final release of “The Skywayman” - Locklear died on the screen that bore his name