Australian flag carrier Qantas wants to ban its pilots from growing beards over fears that facial hair could interfere with special oxygen masks following a safety review by the British defense and aerospace company QinetiQ.
The study concluded that beards could interfere with a quick-donning pilot oxygen system designed to create an airtight seal around the pilot’s face.
As it stands, Qantas’ mainline pilots are already barred from growing beards, but pilots working for regional subsidiaries such as QantasLink have been allowed to wear beards.
The new grooming policy would affect all pilots, including regional flight crew, resulting in a backlash in which some crew are growing beards in protest at the proposed rule.
They point to a study by researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, recently published in the Journal of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, that found beards had no impact on the effectiveness of pilot oxygen systems.
To test whether beards could affect the oxygen mask, researchers put 24 volunteers in a hypoxia chamber to mimic the effects of decompression while flying at 30,000 feet.
Some of the volunteers were clean-shaven, while others had short beards and some had long beards more than 10mm in length.
The study concluded that the volunteers with beards took no more time to don the oxygen masks than the clean-shaven participants, and there was no difference in the “arterial saturation percent of oxygen” between any of the volunteers during the decompression-like conditions.
The research also tested whether smoke or noxious fumes could penetrate the mask when the wearer had a beard, and to test this, ‘highly volatile’ smelling salts were wafted around the pilots as they wore the masks.
None of the pilots could detect any smell, suggesting that the masks remained airtight.
The results back up a previous study in 2016 that also concluded that beards do not limit the effectiveness of pilot oxygen systems. That study was commissioned by Air Canada, and as a result, the airline dropped a prohibition on its pilots wearing beards.
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has no issue with pilots wearing beards, but major carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines, impose their own facial hair bans.
In 2022, Qantas was slammed by its flight attendant union over its outdated grooming standards, which included a ban on male cabin crew wearing beards.
A study with a data set of 24 people is not a “study” in any real sense and could not possibly lead to statistically significant results. Let’s leave it to Qantas to protect their own passengers and planes worth hundreds of millions of dollars rather than junk science purveyors with no skin in the game who will not pay if something goes wrong.
My experience as old, retired and bearded Divemaster is that beards can interfere with mask seals unless beards are cropped quite close.