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Ormer Locklear
and the “Lunatics"
Aerobatics were a part of flying from the start: they were
certainly an important element of
Lilienthal’s career. The
Wrights indulged in aerobatics, though they probably
would have bristled at the
suggestion that they were having any fun at it. Curtiss, a
seasoned racer, understood the
entertainment potential of flying and fielded an
exhibition team around 1909. One of his fliers,
Charles “Daredevil”
Hamilton, survived sixty-three crashes, only
to die in bed of tuberculosis in
1914 at the age of twenty eight.
A newspaper advertisement for Ormer Locklear's Flying
Circus, 1919.
The photo at left shows two Curtiss JN-4D biplanes in
formation flight with a
wingwalker hanging by his knees from the axle of the higher
aircraft. The photo at right shows a clown on a JN-4.
(Hamilton’s observations about his 1911 flights in
Mexico with Roland Garros
and the Moisant Brothers first
alerted tacticians to the military uses of airplanes.)
Before the war, planes were limited in the manoeuvers
they could perform and fliers were still
grappling with the basics
of flying. The feats of Adolphe Pegoud captured
the imagination of many
young fliers and spurred them on
to try stunts neither they nor the planes were prepared
to do. One such flier was
Lincoln Beachey, a member of the
Curtiss team whose stubborn
determination made him the most
daring and celebrated of the pre-war fliers.
Portrait of barnstomer Ormer Locklear, 1919
Beachey is credited with
dispensing once and for all with
the forward elevators of the Curtiss planes; he once set
an altitude record
of 11,642 feet by simply
climbing until he ran out of fuel and then gliding back to
the ground with a dead engine. His stubbornness
resulted in many crashes, and he
must have had a very high
threshold for pain to have survived some of them.
Dressed in a pinstripe suit, a
high collar, and fancy tie,
and wearing a large golf cap turned backwards, Beachey
would fly close to the
ground, let go of the controls and
wave to the crowd; he would loop over and over,
getting closer to the
grandstands with each loop; or fly under,
through, or around bridges,
streets, hangars open at both
ends, and even inside large exhibition halls.
Lincoln Beachey
His most famous
stunt was to fly over Niagara Falls, dive down
toward the foam below and pull up in the mist just
as he was about to crash
into the river then fly under a
bridge and land, dripping wet and
smiling to the crowd of
150,000. In 1914, after a brief retirement, Beachey
toured the country racing
auto-racer Barney Oldfield (“The
Daredevil of the Air” vs. “The Demon of the
Ground”) in front of large
audiences. Beachey died on March
14, 1915, performing a stunt near the San
Francisco pier as part of
the Panama-Pacific Exposition.
After World War I, aviators were to be found
almost everywhere in the
American countryside. These young
fliers often slept Out in the field
under the wings of their
machines, and frequently they would offer a ride in
return for a meal or enough
gasoline to get them to the next
town. They had to learn how to fix their own
machines, and they
frequently came up with novel solutions to problems. They
performed ever more complex
and dangerous stunts because the jaded public demanded it.
Some barnstormers travelled with an ambulance that would
simply drive through the town with its siren blaring,
leading customers to the airfield. In time, fliers pooled
their resources and formed little troupes, and sometimes the
best partnerships were formed when a flier and a talented
promoter joined forces.
Lincoln Beachey’s flights in and
through enclosed
buildings (as in this 1913
demonstration) required
careful planning and deft
airmanship
One such team became the most successful
barnstorming act of the post-war period—the flier Ormer
Leslie Locklear and the promoter William Pickens. Locklear
had been trained at the Army Air Service flight school at
Barron Field, near Fort Worth, Texas, and was performing
stunts on the wings of his Jenny even while in the service.
Wingwalking was not new in 1918; it was not unheard of that
a pilot or passenger would (if he absolutely had to) climb
out onto a wing to make a timely repair or pry loose a
stubborn control surface. But Locklear took the practice to
new levels, devising new stunts that seemed aimed at nothing
less than tempting fate. He perfected the use of the
over-wing struts on the Jenny as a brace for wingwalking;
spectators who never noticed the structures before thought
they were made specifically for Locklear.
Four images of barnstormer Omer Locklear performing various
wingwalking stunts with his Curtiss JN-4D, around 1919-1920.
When Locklear met Pickens in 1919, the
promoter already had a great deal of experience promoting
barnstormers like Lincoln Beachey and some post-war fliers,
but from the very beginning Pickens knew he was going to
have his greatest success with Locklear. Jumping from one
plane to another was Locklear’s trademark stunt, and then,
when the public tired of that, he worked on jumping from a
car to a plane and from a plane to car. Locklear was
severely injured in some of the earlier attempts of this
stunt, but Pickens used that (and exaggerated bandages) to
heighten the drama and stir public interest.
View of Clyde Pangborn caught mid-air, falling, during his
unsuccessful
attempt to make an airplane-to-automobile transfer at
Coronado Tent City, Coronado Beach, California, on May 16,
1920.
One stunt of Locklear’s, the “Dance of
Death,” is difficult to believe and is probably the most
thrilling aerial stunt ever performed. Locklear would pilot
one plane and fly right next to a second plane, with the two
aircraft almost touching wings. At a signal, with the controls
locked in place, the two pilots
would change places, passing each
other as they scampered across the wings!
Locklear and Pickens became
wealthy and lived in high style,
in contrast to the poverty of most other
barnstormers. They became even more successful when
they brought the act to Los
Angeles and came to the attention
of the movie-making community.
After several highly publicized
exhibitions at an airfield owned by Sydney Chaplin,
Charlie Chaplin’s brother, Pickens arranged
for Locklear to appear as a
stunt man in Universal’s The Great Air
Robbery in 1920, and an offer
was made by Twentieth
Century Fox for a feature film, the Skywayman. Locklear
took to Hollywood very
well.
Roscoe Turner was one of the daredevil pilots on the
barnstorming circuit.
He became a hit. Buzzing the lot,
he perfected a manoeuvre in which he
ricocheted off the roof of
the sound stages, calling it the “Locklear
Bounce,” and he romanced a
rising young actress at Metro,
Viola Dana (though he had a wife back in Texas).
During the filming of The
Skywayman, Locklear insisted on
performing his stunts as realistically as possible,
including those scripted to take place at night (and
forgoing the device of using filters to
make daytime scenes appear
as though shot at night). On August 2,
1920, while filming one of
the night scenes, Locklear was
apparently blinded by a spotlight; the Jenny went into a
tailspin and crashed.
Locklear received what might be
called a gala Hollywood funeral (complete with
Viola weeping, alone in her
limousine). Locklear had made the
entire enterprise respectable and
profitable, and with the help of the hundreds of
fliers
who flew for
meal money, he rekindled the nation’s interest in flying.
Beachey on his
last flight, just moments
before he plunged into San
Francisco Bay,
on March 14, 1915.
After January 1920, however, many
fliers moved south and saw their
fortunes take an immediate turn
for the better. The passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment—Prohibition—had provided them
with a new source of
income: using their planes to smuggle
liquor from Mexico into the United
States. One barnstorming troupe operated out of
Dallas, Texas, under the name “The
Lunatics of Love Field,” managed
by the irrepressible Floyd “Slats” Rogers. Rogers would
conduct air shows
in the afternoon and send one of the planes across
the border for a shipment of whiskey.
Pancho Barnes was a well-known daredevil pilot of the
barnstorming era.
If Slats
suspected a government
agent was in the crowd, he would have the
plane smuggling in the
contraband join the stunt or formation as if it had been
stunt-flying all along. The
Lunatics operated successfully
until Congress passed the Air
Commerce Act of 1926. The law called for
the licensing of aircraft and pilots, and laid down
strict rules about the kinds of
stunts fliers could perform.
Ironically, the law was passed at the insistence of
the fledgling air transport
industry, who saw the barnstormers
as fostering the idea that flying was dangerous and
difficult — which, of course,
is the whole idea behind
barnstorming in the first place.
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