OWLS HEAD — From a thousand feet in the air, pilot Julie Clark dipped and rolled her Beechcraft T-34 in a ballet choreographed for the skies. Then from a dead standstill at the top, she hurtled toward Earth, reaching speeds of 230 mph as she cruised past an admiring crowd, her single-engine aircraft perilously close to the ground.

Just short of the trees lining the runway, Clark pulled up hard, and the T-34 ascended abruptly in an aerobatic triumph over gravity. More flips and spins followed as Clark thrilled onlookers at the Owls Head Transportation Museum.

Clark’s 15-minute daredevil routine capped a string of performances featuring World War I and II aircraft at the Military Aviation & Aerobatic Airshow over the weekend. A crowd of 1,400 men, women and children watched Saturday as Clark landed to the final strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” They applauded as she taxied in, stood in the open cockpit and waved the American flag.

Clark’s wizardry in the air wasn’t wasted on 12-year-old Katie Mackin of Millinocket, who pronounced the pilot’s maneuvers “awesome,” and shyly ventured that while she’d never considered flying before, she might think about it now.

Had Clark heard Katie’s remarks, she would have beamed.

Encouraging other women to challenge the status quo is not a small part of what drives this native Californian. In an interview before the performance, Clark, 49, said her advice to aspiring female pilots is to “start young” and “get your parents involved.” Having beat the odds in a world once closed to women, Clark knows of what she speaks when she stresses the need for family support. It’s an advantage she was denied.

In 1964, nine months after her mother’s accidental death, Clark’s father, airline Capt. Ernie Clark, was murdered midflight from Reno, Nev., to San Francisco, when a passenger entered the cockpit and shot the entire crew. The crash and deaths of all on board prompted passage of the Clark Act, which today requires that cockpit doors remain locked during commercial flights. For Julie Clark, then 16, whose love of flying she learned from her father, the tragedy inspired a lifelong effort to unlock those cockpit doors to women.

“A lot of women pilots have told me, `If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t be here today,”‘ said Clark, whose feats in the air are informed by the same energy and focus she brings to a conversation. She speaks quickly in sentences packed with detail. Blue-green eyes flash and replica T-34 earrings fly as she nods her head to emphasize her points. She homes in on the ups and downs of her life, always keeping an eye on the others in the room and an ear open to what they might have to say.

In some ways, the mere facts of Clark’s life don’t capture her full measure, for she’s more than what she has accomplished. Yet the facts themselves are impressive enough. In 1977, she became one of the first women pilots to fly for a major airline, and has been a captain for Northwest Airlines since 1984. For three years before her work with a commercial airline, she flew as a civilian instructor for the Navy, training young pilots in tactical maneuvers. In the late ’70s, she bought her Beechcraft T-34 for $18,000 and refurbished it herself.

She has performed for the past 18 years in air show routines that punish the body. In vertical climbs on Saturday, for instance, Clark experienced a G-force of 4, equivalent to feeling the pressure of four times her own body weight as she climbs. Ground crew member and friend Gary McMahan said that physiologically, Clark’s 15-minute shows equate to seven hours of hard work.

Clark is also more than the dozens of awards she has received over the years, among them, the FAA’s Certificate of Appreciation for her contributions to women in aviation and preservation of military aircraft.

Clark might say she is the culmination of 49 years of “desire, determination and discipline,” but she’s more than that as well. Not given to philosophical analysis, she resists the notion that she was driven to triumph over tragedy or that a kind of fatalism kindled her risk-taking nature.

At 19, ignoring the conventional advice of her guardian, she started taking flying lessons while in college. She paid for them by holding down two full-time jobs during the summer, one as a professional water-skier, the other as a cocktail waitress. When people said, “You can’t,” she found a way she could.

McMahan told the story of seeing Clark entranced one morning with the birds flying above her head. But Clark wasn’t ruminating about the symbolic freedom of flight. “She was admiring their efficiency,” he said with a laugh.

And as recently as this past Friday, while stopped in front of Moody’s Diner in Waldoboro, Clark reacted and followed through after witnessing a man treat his German shepherd roughly.

“He picked him up by the nape of the neck and the skin on his back and threw him into the back of his truck. I told him, `That’s no way to treat an animal,”‘ Clark recalled. Rather than let the incident go, she got his license plate number and reported him to police.

It’s small details like this, as much as her heroics in the sky, that define Clark. Even her patriotic air routine stems from a genuine, deep feeling for her country. She said the name of her plane, Free Spirit, doesn’t refer to her own life, but to the “spirit of freedom” this country embodies. She explained that a year as an exchange student in Chile opened her eyes to the advantages of being an American.

“I realized how lucky we are in this country,” she said. “I’ve been patriotic ever since.”

And despite the obstacles she’s faced throughout her life, including some “hard-headed, egotistical, macho men” in the world of aviation, Clark believes that “only in the U.S.” could she have flown so high.