Ormer Locklear, the Wing Walker Who Stepped From One Jenny to Another in Midair and Then Died on Camera Chasing the Shot

Ormer Locklear was a Texas-born stunt flyer who became one of the most famous men in America by climbing between two airplanes in midair without a parachute, harness, or net. He invented the aerial “plane change” during the barnstorming boom that followed World War I, then died on August 2, 1920, at age 28, filming a night dive for the movie The Skywayman when a searchlight signal that was supposed to warn him away from the ground never came.

Who Was Ormer Locklear?

Locklear was an Army flight cadet at Barron Field, near Fort Worth, Texas, in 1918. Young, athletic, and fearless, he was training on the airplane that taught nearly an entire generation to fly: the Curtiss JN-4, universally known as the “Jenny.” It was a 90-horsepower, open-cockpit biplane held together with wood, wire, and faith. If you flew in America between the wars, you probably touched one.

The Jenny had a quirk. The radiator cap on the top-wing center section could work loose, a spark plug could foul, or a wire could come undone somewhere the pilot couldn’t reach. The sane procedure was to land and fix it on the ground.

Locklear did not do the sane procedure.

How Wing Walking Began - By Accident

On a training flight, something came loose on the Jenny’s top wing. Instead of landing, Locklear unbuckled, stood up in the open cockpit against a 60-to-70-mph slipstream, and climbed onto the wing to fix the problem himself - in flight, while a fellow cadet flew the airplane.

Consider what that took. In 1918, Army trainees wore no parachutes. There was no harness and no tether. Just two hands, the wind, and a razor-thin margin between showing off and dying.

Up there, Locklear discovered something that changed his life: if you kept your weight low, knew where the wires ran, and respected the wind, an airplane in flight was a place a man could stand and walk.

Word spread fast. Soon Locklear and two buddies - Milton Elliott, who became his regular pilot, and Shirley Short - were putting on informal shows over the field. The Army, rather than court-martialing him, saw value in teaching pilots not to panic when they had to climb out onto the structure. For a time, his wing walking was almost semi-official.

Why the Barnstorming Era Exploded After WWI

When the Armistice came in November 1918, the U.S. government owned thousands of Jennys and had no more use for them. Nearly new airplanes were sold off for pennies on the dollar - you could buy a real, flying Curtiss Jenny for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less.

That created something America had never had at once: cheap airplanes and a generation of young men who knew how to fly them and had nothing else to do. That is the entire spark of the barnstorming era.

These pilots fanned out across the country, landed in farmers’ pastures, and offered rides for a dollar or five. For most spectators, it was the first airplane they had ever seen up close. But everyone had a Jenny, and everyone offered rides. To draw a crowd, you needed a show - and nobody gave a show like Ormer Locklear.

The Stunt That Made Him Famous: The Midair Plane Change

When Locklear mustered out of the Army in 1919, promoter William Pickens signed him, and Locklear assembled a flying circus with Elliott and Short flying while he worked the wings. He was a natural showman - handsome, confident, arms spread wide on the top wing while the crowd drank it in.

He did the stunts no one else would attempt: hanging from the landing gear by his knees, standing on the top wing through a loop, and dangling from a rope ladder skimming the ground. But one stunt put his name in every newspaper in America - the plane change.

Here is how it worked:

Two Jennys flew in tight formation, one above the other.
Locklear climbed out of the lower airplane onto its top wing and reached up.
The upper airplane eased down until its landing gear hung just a few feet above his head.
He grabbed the gear, let go of his own airplane, and climbed up into the second plane.

No tether. No net. No parachute.

The flying alone was extraordinary. The airplane Locklear left grew lighter and squirrelier as his weight came off; the airplane he joined grew heavier and mushier as his weight came on. Both pilots had to fly through that shift without a wobble - and a wobble meant Locklear falling 3,000 feet. They had no radios between aircraft. It was all hand signals, trust, and endless repetition until it became muscle memory.

Crowds went wild. People fainted. He toured through 1919 and into 1920, reportedly earning around $2,000 a show - a fortune at the time - and became one of the most famous men in the country. Which, inevitably, got Hollywood’s attention.

How Did Ormer Locklear Die?

Hollywood was hungry for spectacle, and in this era before special effects, spectacle meant putting a real man on a real airplane and pointing a camera at him. Locklear went to California and made The Great Air Robbery, performing his stunts for real on film. Audiences had never seen anything like it.

Then came 1920 and a picture called The Skywayman.

The film had a night scene in which Locklear’s Jenny goes into a screaming spiral dive toward the ground and pulls out at the last second. They shot it at night over an oil field near Los Angeles, with searchlights illuminating the airplane for the cameras.

Locklear and Elliott had an agreement with the crew: when it was time to pull out of the dive, the searchlights would cut off. Lights out was the signal to level the wings and climb away.

On the night of August 2, 1920, they took the Jenny up and pushed it into the spiral dive, down toward the oil derricks, the searchlights tracking them the whole way. But the searchlights never went out. No one knows for certain why - perhaps a missed cue, perhaps the crew was mesmerized. The signal never came, and blinded by the lights in the dark, Elliott and Locklear couldn’t judge their height above the ground.

They flew straight into the oil field. Both men were killed instantly. Ormer Locklear was 28 years old.

The cameras kept rolling and filmed the crash. When The Skywayman was released weeks later, the studio advertised it using the footage of his death. That final dive on screen is real.

Why Locklear’s Story Still Matters for Pilots

Barnstormers didn’t take the crash as a reason to stop flying. They took it as a lesson: the airplane doesn’t care how famous or experienced you are. The night, the dark, and a signal that never comes will kill the best wing walker in the world as surely as the greenest student.

Situational awareness. Knowing where the ground is. Always having an out. Those truths held in 1920, and they hold every time you fire up an airplane today.

But that is not the only way to remember him. Picture Locklear standing on the top wing of a Curtiss Jenny, arms spread wide, thousands of feet above a small Kansas town while ten thousand people who had never dreamed of flight stared up with their hearts in their throats. A great many of the people who later filled the flight schools, the airlines, and the Army Air Corps first caught the bug watching a barnstormer.

Ormer Locklear didn’t just do stunts. He sold America on the idea that the sky was a place you could go.

Key Takeaways

Ormer Locklear pioneered aerial wing walking and the midair plane change, first climbing onto a wing in 1918 to fix a Curtiss Jenny in flight.
The post-WWI surplus of cheap Jennys and idle military pilots created the barnstorming era, and Locklear became its biggest star, reportedly earning about $2,000 per show.
His signature stunt moved him between two formation-flying Curtiss JN-4s with no parachute, harness, or net.
He died on August 2, 1920, at age 28, when a searchlight cutoff signal failed during a night dive for the film The Skywayman; pilot Milton Elliott died with him.
His legacy is both inspirational and cautionary: he sold America on aviation, and his death remains a lesson in situational awareness and always having an out.