| Michelle Gooris | |
| Occupation: | Airline pilot and YouTuber |
| Channel Direct Url: | @DutchPilotGirl |
| Channel Display Name: | DutchPilotGirl |
| Years Active: | 2014–present |
| Subscribers: | 377K |
| Views: | 34.7 million |
| Stats Update: | 3 September 2024 |
Michelle Gooris, also known as DutchPilotGirl, is a Dutch airline pilot known for documenting the life of a pilot and promoting learning to fly.[1] She seeks to dispel the misconceptions of becoming a pilot as well as showing a cockpits view of the world.
Gooris was initially aimed at a medical career going to medical school.[2] She decided to pivot career and began her training to become a pilot when she was 19 years old at the CAE Aviation Academies in Oxford, Amsterdam and Arizona, for two years of courses. Her grandfather had become a pilot when he was 74 and Gooris was 17, and he encouraged her to also take up flying. She now encourages people to consider being pilots, but especially women who she says are still under represented in the field. She says that 95% of pilots are male, a statistic that is mirrored in her YouTube viewer demographics.[3] In 2021 India had the highest percentage of female pilots, but that was still just 12%.
She graduated as a pilot in 2013, and she started her YouTube channel under her alias DutchPilotGirl June 2014 gaining hundreds of thousands of subscribers and ten of millions of views over the following decade. Her first videos were of her first solo flights in a Piper PA-28 Cherokee and a Diamond DA40 Diamond Star.[4] Initially after qualifying she failed to find a job flying and it was two years before she got her first job working for Ryanair as the copilot of a Boeing 737. Before landing a job as a pilot she kept her focus on aviation working as an instructor at a flight simulator.[5] She later moved to a Palma de Mallorca based charter company after around 500 flight hours with Ryanair.
As well as her social media used to promote flying Gooris also wrote an ebook called Become an Airline Pilot.[6] She has also created other resources to help people considering this career path, including a mobile app and a website.
Her videos of pilot viewpoints of places attract interest across many countries, from The Connexion reporting on her views of the French Riviera[7] to The Dubrovnik Times on landing at Dubrovnik Airport.[8]
Although she has stated that in her company she has "never experienced overt sexism"[9] some reporting of her, and other female pilots, choose to focus more on her looks than her abilities and flight related content, with some choosing to refer to her as the "World's sexiest airline pilot"[10] or "Instagram's Hottest Female Pilot".[11]