A Little Information On The Flying Circus "Barnstormers"
Have you ever stuck your hand out of the window of your car? Most people have. At low speeds, it's kind of fun to make your hand "fly" in the strong breeze. But have you ever done it at higher speeds? 50, 60, 70 miles per hour? Probably not because you realize that you could get your arm broken off. But can you imagine getting out and standing up on top of your car if it was doing over a hundred miles per hour? Imagine doing that very thing but instead, on the wing of an airplane while it is flying hundreds or thousands of feet over the landscape! Just thinking about it might make your palms start to perspire. But that's exactly what barnstorming wing walkers did.
Ormer Locklear is generally credited as the first man to wing walk, or at the very least, the person most responsible for the growth of the phenomenon. Locklear was working as a carpenter and mechanic in Fort Worth, Texas, when he joined the U.S. Army Air Service in October 1917, just a few days short of his 26th birthday. Pilot Cadet Locklear started wingwalking by climbing out onto his Jenny biplane's lower wing while in mid-air to fix mechanical problems. On one occasion Locklear ventured out to fix a radiator cap that had come loose from his plane's engine, and another time he left the cockpit to fix a sparkplug wire. Locklear could have been court-martialed for such antics but Jenny biplanes were suffering a rash of accidents at the time and he was encouraged to keep doing these hair-raising stunts as it was a great boost to the morale of his colleagues.
Locklear developed most of the fundamental skills on which wing walking rested. He perfected such basic wing walking stunts as handstands and hanging postures. He also helped develop the impressive stunt of hanging from a plane by grasping only a trapeze bar or rope ladder with his teeth. Many Flying Circus wingwalkers went on to perform this same stunt.
Ormer Locklear, the "King of the Wing Walkers," died while performing a stunt for a Hollywood film in August 1920, only a year-and-a-half after turning professional. Although Locklear was supposedly the greatest stunt person of the day, even his skills were not enough to overcome the uncertainties that sometimes accompanied such seemingly death-defying feats.
In 1936, the U.S. government outlawed wing walking below 1,500 feet, which essentially doomed the Flying Circus as audiences could not easily see stunts performed above that altitude. Federal regulations also started requiring stunt people to wear parachutes, whether it was part of their act or not. And as if those changes were not enough, increased insurance premiums soon followed.
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