 Sanfirova was born in 1917 to a working family; she was an ethnic Tatar.She went to secondary school in the Uzbek SSR before she moved to Moscow to attend flight school in Kolomna.After graduating flight school she worked at the Department of Aviation in Moscow before transferring to Tatarsk, Novosibirsk in 1940 to train pilots of the 78th squadron of the West Siberia Civil Aviation Directorate.