Dorothy Hester Stenzel
American aviator and stunt pilot
Dorothy Hester Hofer Stenzel (September 14, 1910 – February 25, 1991) was an American aviator and stunt pilot. She had a groundbreaking stunt aerobatics career, often performing as "Princess-Kick-a-Hole-in-the-Sky", and later opened her own flight school in Cornelius, Oregon.
Childhood
Stenzel was born in Milwaukie, Oregon, in 1910. She attended Ardenwald Elementary School, St. Agatha School, and Milwaukie High School. As a child, she remembered chasing after a hot-air balloon in an attempt to get a ride. She was the second-youngest of five sisters.
Pilot training
A week before Stenzel turned seventeen, she learned that she could get a plane ride near the Swan Island Municipal Airport in Portland. She took a street car into Portland, then walked to a small airport "just south of Swan Island". As she neared the airport, she began to run, afraid that "they were either going to crack up or run out of gas before I could get there." She loved her plane ride, and remarked to the pilot, "If I was a boy, I'd certainly learn to fly!" The pilot encouraged her to sign up for lessons, but the cost was prohibitively high.
“Dorothy Hester Stenzel” enters the record as american aviator and stunt pilot. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dorothy, Hester and Stenzel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29930717. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1910 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dorothy Hester Stenzel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.