Welcome to the official website of
American Barnstormer Walt Pierce and the
Double Trouble Wing Walking Team
Wing Walking & Air Show History...
"Walt is ICAS #14, flying airshows since 1963. His memory of events and people is phenomenal and a national asset. Pierce has flown many many airshows across the Carolinas, known many of the airshow greats and continues to carry on the tradition of the Barnstormer."
Quoted from Hugh Oldham's Proairshow site.
Here are just a few links to get you started with discovering our rich American Barnstorming history...
For a look at a very historic "airshow" of sorts... take a look at this amazing footage from 1909 of "Wilbur Wright & his Flying Machine"
Jessie (Schulz) Woods - Timeless Voices of Aviation "Voice of the Week" -VIDEO
Wing Walkers - U.S. Centennial of Flight
Barnstormers - at PBS Kids
Mabel Cody's Flying Circus - at AirMinded
Lillian Boyer - "Empress of the Air"/Heroes of the Sky at the Henry Ford Museum
Clyde Pangborn - a biography of Clyde Pangborn, 1918-1958
For more in-depth info, we suggest these two books which can usually be found through used books sites:
Archival video footage of Wing Walkers & Daredevils of the Golden Age of Aviation:
For many more short clips of these daredevils and others, check out this site...
"A barnstormer often was part stunt pilot, part showman, part grease monkey, part entrepreneur."
quoted from Barnstorming pilots always drew a crowd by Joe Earle (The Wichita Eagle, December 3, 1984)
Wing walking and the United States Air Force... bound together since 1918!
While there are a variety of reasons given for the US Army Air Service's Lt. Ormer Locklear's first walk out on the wing in 1918 at Barron Field, Texas, the New York Times reports in an August 4, 1920 article that he had originally begun wing walking because,
"He conceived the idea that it would be possible to mount machine guns on the wings of a plane. Army officers said
it would be impossible to manoeuvre with a man’s weight on the extreme edge of the wings, and some of his first
“stunts” were done to demonstrate that a plane so weighted could be manoeuvred.”
According to the US Centennial of Flight Commission,
"Although Locklear could have been court-martialed for such antics, his commanding officer encouraged him, instead, to
perform more "stunts" because they boosted his colleagues' moral, and their confidence in the soundness of their Jenny
biplanes, which were suffering a rash of accidents at the time."
In short, the early USAF saw wing walking as a fantastic and successful recruiting technique!
Additionally, Locklear was the first person to transfer from one plane to another in flight. This is what inspired and led to the world's first air-to-air refueling in 1919; Wesley May, with a five gallon can of gasoline strapped to his back, transferred from a Standard flown by Frank Hawks to a Jenny piloted by Earl Daugherty ("Chewing Gum, Bailing Wire, and Guts" by Bill Rhode, 1970).
