American actor Ormer Locklear (1891-1920), wearing a tuxedo, walks on the wings of an airplane crashed in a farmer's field in a still from director James P. Hogan's silent film, 'The Skywayman'. Locklear died while performing an aerial maneuver during nighttime shooting for the movie.
Wing walkers in the 1920s have been described as the “ultimate risk-takers of their day.” These daredevils could trace their roots back to Ormer Locklear, a member of the U.S. Army Air Service who started walking onto his Jenny biplane’s lower wing while mid-air to fix flight hazards as a pilot cadet. Although his continued wing-walking ventures were frowned upon in the service, they allegedly boosted morale among his peers and inspired others to perform similar stunts. Locklear became a professional wing walker when he left the Army in 1919. As the “father of aviation acrobatics,” Locklear often performed handstands on the wings mid-flight, and he would wow crowds by using his teeth to hang from the plane’s undercarriage on a trapeze bar or rope ladder. Locklear reportedly used to claim, “Safety second is my motto.” He ultimately died in 1920 while performing an aviation stunt for the film Skywayman.