Sokol's plane departs from Sisters

The skies over Sisters will not be the same.

For the past four decades, folks in the Sisters Country have grown accustomed to the sight - and even more the sound - of Dorro Sokol's Beechcraft Twin Bonanza climbing overhead. On Monday, the venerable plane taxied down the runway at Sisters Eagle Air one last time before soaring up into the wild blue yonder and off to its new home in Nampa, Idaho.

Sokol sold the plane to John Paul, president of the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, who flew it there. It will be the sixth Twin Bonanza in the museum's collection. The plane has a surprising military history: it was designed for executive transport - and that included top military brass. General Dwight Eisenhower was flown in one during his tour of Korea during the conflict there.

According to Sokol, one of the planes advantages for such purposes was a stout undercarriage that could support a safe landing even if the landing gear didn't properly deploy.

Dorro learned to fly after her then husband, a World War II B-17 pilot, acquired her plane to help operate a ranch in remote eastern Oregon. She was no particular aviation enthusiast; her reasons then were purely pragmatic.

"I became licensed in 1959," she recalled. "The reason I started flying was because we got an airplane! I wanted to (learn) because I wanted to be able to get it back down on the ground. I swore I'd never solo."

That vow, of course, did not hold. Sokol came to love flying.

That first plane was a Piper Comanche and the family upgraded a couple of times as the kids got older and bigger, till they eventually acquired the Twin Bonanza.

"We used it for all sorts of things - including bringing the kids to the dentist in Bend," Dorro recalled. "We put in our own air strip... very small, narrow. You had to land in the middle. It was easy."

Sokol brought the Twin Bonanza with her when she moved to Sisters in 1971. She flew out on fishing trips and vacations, to visit friends and relatives and kids in college. She flew for fun and - ironically, for many years, most of her flying has been solo.

Sokol took the bird up for the last time in December 2010, shortly before selling it to Paul.

"He first saw the airplane when I took it to a Twin Bonanza convention in Carson City, oh, six years ago," she said.

A wistful Sokol said she is happy that the plane has found a good new home.

"I'm delighted," she told The Nugget. "I'm going to go over there (to the Warhawk Air Museum) and

see it."

For more information on the museum, visit http://www.warhawkairmuseum.org.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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