As early as 1911, aerial wing walking emerged when pilots had no choice but to venture out onto the wings of their planes to make repairs or technical in-flight adjustments.
By the 1920s, wing walking had gone from being a pilot’s daring necessity to a daredevil stunt. It was the age of barnstorming—a major craze in the United States that peaked after World War I, when jobless former military pilots bought cheap surplus warplanes—like the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny biplane, flying from town to town offering stunts and rides.
Ormer Locklear was one of them. An early Hollywood star, barnstormer, and premier pioneer of wing walking, his Locklear Flying Circus turned a purely practical maneuver into a money-making venture.
Locklear even worked with Cecil B. DeMille, founding father of American Cinema. But his fame was short-lived. In August of 1920, in a night-time shoot with his plane’s wings fitted with flares to simulate fire, the plane crashed into an oil sludge pit, killing him instantly.
Women Take to the Skies
As luck would have it, the 19th Amendment was also ratified in 1920, at the peak of post-WWI barnstorming and wing walking. It was also the heyday of the Suffrage movement, and women soon realized that daredevil stunts could give them things their male counterparts took for granted—independence, employment, freedom and, if they proved good enough, equal pay for equal work. Heady stuff that felt incredibly liberating.
Gladys Ingle (1899-1981) was the only female member of Hollywood’s 13 Black Cats aerial daredevil stunt troop, and just the fourth woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license when she began performing jumps from balloons for the C.P.O. Aerial Circus in 1921 (C.P.O may stand for Commercial Pilots Organization; the abbreviation remains a mystery among aviation historians).
By 1922, she was performing stunts involving airplanes. Through her performances in the 1920s and 1930s, she became world-renowned for her aerobatics and wing walking.
Through it all, she always considered herself a working girl. As far as she was concerned, changing planes in midair was all in a day’s work. She learned how to walk blindfolded on the wings of a Curtis JN-4 Jenny biplane over Los Angeles and, in one stunt, even performed feats of archery atop a biplane in midair.
No Parachute or Safety Gear
With their abundance of struts and wires for gripping, the Jennys were ideal for aerialists like Gladys. She earned her stripes by changing planes in mid-air without a parachute or wearing any safety gear. But all that changed in 1927 with the passage of new legislation requiring daredevils like her to protect themselves.
Gladys Ingle lived to the ripe old age of 82 before her death in 1981.
Lillian Boyer (1901-1989), a small-town Nebraska waitress who dreamed of taking to the skies, became a sensational aerialist during the 1920s. When two of her customers invited her to join them for a flight in 1921, she jumped at the chance. Seemingly fearless, by her second flight she decided to try wing walking.
In her eight years as an aerial stuntwoman, she completed 352 shows throughout the 1920s, eventually adding parachute jumping—she made 37 parachute jumps, including 13 into Lake Erie, and 143 automobile-to-airplane jumps where she leapt from a speeding automobile onto the wing of a low-flying biplane. She hung from the plane by her ankles and toes; balanced on her head and jumped from plane to plane in mid-air. With no parachutes or harnesses, she relied on talent, timing, and raw nerve. But Lillian Boyer was just warming up.
Hanging by Her Teeth
She perfected her most dangerous – and crowd-pleasing—stunt of all—The Breakaway, where she hung by her teeth. As Boyer described it, she took a strong, thin cable with her as she walked out onto the wing and attached it to a strut; the cable had a mouthpiece on it. Her pilot could reel the cable in from the cockpit, but awed spectators 3,000 feet below didn’t know that. “After I’d do a few things on the tip of the lower wing, I’d put the mouthpiece in and climb over the wing to the skid … then hang there a minute and let go. The ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs’ would start as they thought I was falling. Then the cable would go taut and I’d hang there under the plane doing a spread eagle and other tricks.”
The newspapers of the day ate it up, with headlines dubbing her The Girl of Nerve, The Aerial Sensationalist and The Fair Devil of the Air. In 1922, a Milwaukee reporter wrote of her, “she is without doubt the greatest thrill-producer since the days of the gladiators.”
It wasn’t until the late ‘20s when federal rules on low-flying and unsafe planes forced Lillian Boyer and many other barnstormers into retirement. She died in 1989 at the age of 89 after breaking her hip.
Jumping from Wing to Parachute
Bessie “Queen Bess” Coleman (1892-1926) is best known today as the first African American woman and first Native American person to earn an international pilot’s license, achieving this milestone in June 1921 after overcoming intense racial and gender barriers. But she was also one of America’s greatest aerial stuntwomen who saw the sky as “the only place free from prejudices.”
When American Flight schools denied her entry, she taught herself French, moved to France, and earned her pilot’s license from its well-known Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in just 7 months. Returning home, she gave speeches and showed films of her aerial tricks in churches, theaters and schools to earn a living, steadfastly refusing to speak in segregated venues.
In 1922 Bessie Coleman performed the first public flight by an African American woman, gaining fame for her “loop-the-loops” and daring figure-eights. She also toured America giving flight lessons, performing in air shows and encouraging African Americans and women to learn to fly.
In a 1925 Texas tour, Coleman performed a highly publicized wing walk at an air show, climbing out of the cockpit, stepping onto the plane’s wing at 3,000 feet, and jumping from the wing to parachute down into the cheering crowd.
Fell to her Death
Tragically, Bessie Coleman plummeted to her death at age 34 during an aerial show rehearsal. In April 1926 she took a flight test with a mechanic who was piloting the plane. A loose wrench somehow got stuck in the engine, causing the pilot to lose control as the plane flipped over. Coleman was not wearing a seatbelt; and because planes at that time had no roofs, she fell from the open plane and died.
Famed activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett performed her funeral service in Chicago; in 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago initiated a tradition of flying over Coleman’s grave every year. By 1977, Black female pilots had formed the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club. And Coleman was honored in 1995 when the US Postal Service issued the “Bessie Coleman Stamp” honoring her accomplishments.