Carolina (Carola) Elena Lorenzini (15 August 1889 – 23 November 1941) was a pioneer Argentine aviator.

Life

Lorenzini was born in

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

, Argentina, the seventh of eight children. She worked as a typist at the Unión Telefónica Company, and enjoyed participating in sports such as rowing, javelin, athletics and hockey. In 1933 she started learning to fly at the Aeroclub de Morón. The lessons were expensive, and she had to use all her savings, and sell her bicycle and encyclopedia, to pay. In March 1935 she earned her pilot's license. The same year, she broke the South American record for altitude, flying to 5,700 metres. She also entered and won several flying races, and became interested in high aerobatics, enrolling in a course on the subject. She became famous for her skill in performing inverted loops, an advanced maneouvre which only one other aviator, her instructor Santiago Germanó, was able to perform. From 1938 to 1940, Lorenzini was involved in an air exploration mission to fly all of Argentina's 14 provinces and make aerial maps for transport and mail flights. She flew to every town and city in the country, annotating maps as she travelled. As a result, she became nationally famous; in 1939 the magazine ''Vosotras'' named Lorenzini one of Argentina's eight women of the year, and in 1940 she featured on the cover of '' El Grafico'' magazine. On 23 November 1941 Lorenzini lost control of her aircraft, a

Focke-Wulf Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau AG () was a German manufacturer of civil and military aircraft before and during World War II. Many of the company's successful fighter aircraft designs were slight modifications of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. It is one of the ...

, while conducting her famous inverted loop, and crashed. She died immediately. The accident happened in Morón during an aerobatics exhibition for a visiting group of Uruguayan aviators. It was later reported that Lorenzini had been flying an aircraft she was unfamiliar with and that she had been extremely angry on the day of the exhibition due to an ongoing issue with the organisers of the event. In 2001, the Argentine post office issued a postage stamp bearing Lorenzini's image and name.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lorenzini, Carola 1889 births 1941 deaths Aerobatic pilots Argentine women aviators Aviators killed in aviation accidents or incidents in Argentina Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1941