Dora Jean Dougherty Strother: Pioneer Woman Aviator and Engineer (1921–2013)

Dora Jean Dougherty Strother, woman aviator and leader in aircraft crew station design, was born into the middle class family of Jonathan “John” Maynard Dougherty and Ester Lucille (Wardle) Dougherty on November 27, 1921, in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1932 after living for some time in Garden City, New York, near Roosevelt Field, her family moved to Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, along the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1939 Dougherty graduated from New Trier High School and began courses at Cottey College, an all-women’s school in Nevada, Missouri. The previous year the United States began the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP). The CPTP was created to form a pool of trained pilots, ready for military service if and when the United States entered World War II. However, there was concern that anti-war factions would oppose the program if it was apparent that it was being conducted to help prepare the country for war. To maintain the pretense that it was purely an economic program, the CPTP admitted women, who would not be called for military service. As a result, 10 percent of all trainees were women. In the summer of 1940 Dougherty enrolled as one of three women in the thirty-person class at Northwestern University. After receiving her license, she joined the Ninety-Nines, an organization founded by Amelia Earhart, Marjorie Stinson, and others to provide support to female pilots.

Dougherty returned to college for the 1940–41 academic year. Although she faced resistance by the college faculty, she worked to increase her pilot’s license rating by buying flying time at a small local airport. In 1941 she graduated from Cottey College with an associate degree. The following year she enrolled as a junior at Northwestern. However, she put her education on hold after learning about a United States Army Air Forces program to train female pilots to fly aircraft within the United States, thereby freeing male pilots to fly overseas. Dougherty took up bookkeeping at the nearby Pal-Waukee Airport, where she worked for flying time to increase her license rating so she could qualify to join the war effort. In 1943 she became a member of the third class of Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Of the 25,000 women who applied, Dougherty was one of only 1,857 who were accepted. She soon moved to Nolan County, Texas, to go through her training at Avenger Field.

Despite receiving the same training as their male counterparts, WASPs were not officially part of the Army Air Forces. Rather, they were classified as citizens (a classification that was not changed until 1977, following years of lobbying by Dougherty and other WASPs to secure recognition as veterans). After finishing her training, Dougherty moved on to Camp Davis in North Carolina, where she towed targets for anti-aircraft gunners to practice on. While at Camp Davis, two women pilots were shot down and died while working the same job. During the last two years of World War II, Dougherty flew twenty-three different types of aircraft. In 1944 Dougherty and Dorothea Johnson “DiDi” Moorman were trained to fly the Boeing B-29 Superfortress and instructed male pilots in their operation. They were the only two women certified to fly the B-29 during the war. Dougherty was a member of the WASP’s post-war Order of Fifinella. In 1949 she took a commission in the Air Force Reserve, where she rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanded the 9823rd Air Reserve Squadron before retiring in 1977. She was the sixth woman in the United States to earn an airline transport pilot certificate, but due to airlines’ preference for male pilots, Dougherty and other WASPs struggled to find work as pilots in the post-war period.

After the war Dougherty returned to Northwestern University. Because WASPs were not considered veterans, she did not benefit from the G.I. Bill. Dougherty worked as a flight instructor at local airfields while attending night classes and graduated from Northwestern in 1949. After graduating she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she taught flight courses and worked in the university’s aviation psychology lab as a research assistant and pilot. In 1953 Dougherty earned her master’s degree there in applied psychology. Two years later she earned a doctorate in aviation education from New York University. After earning her second Ph.D., she returned to the University of Illinois as a research associate for two years and then worked for the Martin Company in human factors design for spacecraft. In 1958 Dougherty began working as the first female human factors engineer at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, where she designed cockpits and pilot interfaces.

At the urging of Jean Ross Howard, Dougherty learned how to fly helicopters. On December 2, 1959, she earned her commercial helicopter rating and became the twenty-seventh woman in the world to be so accredited. She was inducted into Howard’s Whirly Girls, an organization created to promote female helicopter pilots. In 1961 Dougherty set the women’s world records for both altitude and distance in a rotorcraft. That same year she received the Amelia Earhart Award. In 1963 she was interviewed by Lester James Strother, a Fort Worth journalist who became her husband on November 23, 1966. From 1979 to 1981 Dora Strother served as the president of the Whirly-Girls. She retired from Bell in 1986 but continued to serve as a technical consultant to the company.

Strother was inducted into the Military Aviation Hall of Fame and the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame. She received the American Association of University Women’s Achievement Award in 1966 and Northwestern University’s Alumni Merit Award in 1968. Strother was a founding fellow of the Human Factors Society of America and a fellow in the American Psychological Association and American Helicopter Society. She also served on the U.S. Army Science Board.

Lester Strother died in 2001. On November 17, 2002, Dora Strother married Harry McKeown, a former AAF pilot. They lived in both Fort Worth and Sumter, South Carolina. Following the death of her second husband in 2010, Dora Jean Dougherty Strother McKeown relocated to Florida, where she died on November 19, 2013. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.