From ‘Female Pilot’ to Pilot: Kirsty Murphy on Performance, Belonging and the Red Arrows

Kirsty Murphy became the first woman to fly with the Red Arrows, but says that for much of her Royal Air Force (RAF) career she barely thought about being female. Speaking in London, she reflected on gender, recruitment and the training culture behind high performance.

When Kirsty Murphy looked across the flight line at the other pilots she was flying alongside, she did not see herself as the woman among the men.

“This is what it was like being the first female,” the former Royal Air Force (RAF) fast jet and Red Arrows pilot told the Autumn Champions Speakers Showcase in London. “You don’t even know which one I was.”

Put on the helmet and flying kit, climb into the aircraft and close the cockpit, she said, and many of the distinctions that matter elsewhere disappear. What mattered was being “in the right place at the right time, on the radio, making the right radio calls”.

Murphy served for 17 years in the RAF, flying the Tornado GR4 operationally before becoming the first woman selected to fly with the Red Arrows in 2009.

That does not mean military aviation has got gender diversity right. Although women account for 16.4% of RAF Regular personnel (publicly available Ministry of Defence statistics do not provide an equivalent figure specifically for pilots), Murphy remains the only woman to have flown as a Red Arrows pilot. In UK commercial aviation, only around 6% of professional pilots are women.

Murphy said that once she was flying operationally, gender largely receded into the background. “I was just never really that conscious of being female,” she said,

She acknowledges that some women before her had a much tougher experience and felt they needed to be “twice as good”. By the time Murphy came through, she felt she was being judged alongside her peers.

Ironically, joining the RAF’s most visible flying team changed that. “I joined the Red Arrows, and all of a sudden I was a ‘female pilot’,” she said.

Turning a No Into a Problem to Solve

Murphy first became attracted to life in the RAF as a 13-year-old spending time around her father’s squadron, at a time when women were not permitted to fly in combat roles. By the time she was old enough to apply, that had changed.

Getting in was not straightforward, however. Murphy was initially rejected for two reasons. The first related to having attended an all-girls school, which raised concerns about how she would adapt to the overwhelmingly male environment of the RAF. The second was rather more measurable: her arms were two millimetres too short.

For several weeks, Murphy thought the career she had wanted was over. Then she began to see the rejection differently.

“My dream’s gone,” she recalled thinking, before it “turned into a problem that had to be solved”.

She chose to study aeronautical engineering, where just four of the 50 students were women, partly to provide evidence that she could thrive in a male-dominated environment and demonstrate her motivation to join the RAF.

The two millimetres required a different approach. Murphy bought a pull-up bar for her university doorway and regularly hung from it in the hope of stretching her arms sufficiently to meet the requirement.

When the RAF measured her again, she passed. “I thought I lengthened my arms by four millimetres,” she joked.

Confidence Comes From Training

Murphy is equally pragmatic about confidence.

“Confidence based on some evidence and practice, very repetitive practice, is legitimate,” she said.

Before flying operationally in Iraq, she could draw on extensive preparation: “I’ve got all the training. I’ve practised this a lot before. I’ve done lots of sim rides.”

In the Red Arrows, every practice and display was filmed and rigorously debriefed. An error was identified, understood and taken into the next flight as something to improve.

That habit began earlier in military flying training, where pilots learned to assess their own performance rather than wait for an instructor to tell them what had gone wrong.

“It’s about ownership of the debrief,” Murphy said.

Critically, the focus was on performance rather than the individual. “None of it is personal,” she said. An intense debrief could be followed by the team walking out and having coffee together.

It is an approach that has clear parallels with civil aviation’s increasing emphasis on competency-based training, reflection and self-assessment.

Getting People Through the Door

Murphy’s own motivation for joining the RAF was not primarily the aircraft. Spending time around her father’s squadron, she was struck by its professionalism, camaraderie and sense of service.

“I just wanted whatever that was on that squadron,” she recalled.

Male colleagues she later asked about their motivation often said they had seen fast jets or the Red Arrows at an air show and wanted to fly them.

“Completely different reason for doing exactly the same job,” Murphy said.

For aviation recruitment, it raises the question of whether careers are always described in ways that appeal to the widest possible group.

Murphy is wary of quotas at the point of selection. Instead, she supports outreach that gets a broader range of people to aviation’s “front door”.

After her first Red Arrows display, young girls ran up excitedly to tell her they wanted to become pilots, only for their mothers to tell them: “Oh God, you don’t want to do a job like that.”

The encounter convinced Murphy of the importance of showing young people that aviation careers could be for them.

“We’re all just normal people,” she said.