The FAA just issued a new mandate requiring airlines to certify that pilot hiring is based solely on merit—not diversity initiatives—despite zero evidence of compromised safety. Is this regulation necessary, and even legal or just political signaling?
On Friday, the FAA announced new mandatory Operations Specification “Merit-Based Pilot Hiring” for all carriers operating under 14 CFR Part 121, which includes scheduled commercial airlines and it includes major cargo carriers as well.
The certificate holder shall ensure pilot hiring is exclusively merit-based to fulfill its duty to provide the highest possible degree of safety in the public interest.
Air travel remains remarkably safe, and safer than other forms of transportation. There’s no suggestion by DOT that any airline’s practices compromise safety in any way.
Here’s what the notice actually does:
- Directs FAA Principal Operations Inspectors (POIs) to notify each carrier of the Notice’s publication.
- Allow the carrier to submit written “information, views, and arguments” within 7 days of the notification letter.
- After considering any submission, send a disposition letter (adoption, partial adoption, or withdrawal).
- Issues the specification not later than 30 days after completing the previous step.
The Department of Transportation’s press release says “all U.S. carriers will be required to certify that [hiring based on race/sex] is terminated.” That isn’t quite correct. It is a requirement the airline accepts as part of its Operations Specifications.
Of course, most diversity efforts in pilot hiring has related to recruiting efforts and funding for training and that’s because of a shortage of pilots. Any business that wants to be more successful than average will need to do a better job finding talent, which means looking for talent where others aren’t.
And it’s a bit odd to suggest that pilot hiring has been too diversity-focused?
Was the #2 at the Denver hiring center also onboarded through DEI? Did she or did she not change fail grades for DEI hires because “it makes the numbers look bad”?
Did the instructor who failed this co-pilot ask corporate why they passed him?
— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) January 5, 2024
You mean IOE right?
The repair. And a very costly one.
In fact a lot of the time, depending on age of aircraft(and other factors), it may just be totaled. Or repaired and sold. pic.twitter.com/4yzf03eNqd— MFAM Tesla (@JoshuaThePilot) January 5, 2024
The major pilot union was successful in lobbying for legislation that made it unnecessarily time-consuming and costly to become a pilot (e.g. the ‘1,500 hour rule’ which doesn’t apply in Europe, or to European airline pilots flying in the United States every day).
Without enough pilots, airlines went looking for potential recruits. But qualified pilots have not had difficulty in getting hired.
On the contrary, small cities have had difficulty retaining air service because pilot costs are too high to amortize across a very small number of seats. Airlines are phasing out 50-seat regional jets. There aren’t many 30-seat turboprops at regional carriers anymore!
A better approach to safety is broading to pool of available pilots, in order to make it possible to be more selective based on merit.
Now, I’m not sure it is legal to turn hiring policy into an aviation safety standard, turning 49 U.S.C. § 44701 into a general HR regulator. The notice does not make any evidentiary showing that unqualified pilots are being hired. Without data, findings, standard, or a measurable compliance test it’s not clear how this passes Administrative Procedures Act muster.
And while Ops Specs are case-specific approvals, this is a generally applicable mandate across all Part 121 carriers. I’m not even sure how the FAA audits this unless an airline makes announcements that directly claim to violate it. And an investigation is the only promised penalty in any case.
When United was ‘woke’ during the Biden administration (before donating to President Trump’s inaugural and defending his tariffs), they articulated a goal that at least half of new pilots trained would be women or people of color. Statements like that become dangerous under the rule, but they’re only dangerous under this DOT and United wouldn’t make them again until it’s beneficial to do to curry favor with a new administration.
Of course, the FAA itself for years engaged in diversity selection of air traffic controllers for limited spots at their academy, and this directly traded off with hiring ‘more qualified candidates’ but this is not in any way the cause of problems at the agency’s air traffic organization. And everyone that’s gotten into a tower has been properly certified to be there.
I fail to see the problem. No company should be basing their hiring standards on quotas with regard to sex, nationality, sexual orientation or whatever else. This isn’t the victim olympics here. People should always be considered for a position based on merit, education, training and experience. That’s just logical. When I fly, I could careless if the pilots are male or female, black or white, or who they sleep with. The only thing I care about is knowing that the pilots are well-qualified to fly that aircraft, that they have sufficient knowledge & training in emergency recovery and that they’re going to get us safely back on the ground so that I can get back home to my family. That’s it. This is no arena for social experimentation and certainly not a social proving ground.
Anyone who believes that a candidate less qualified for a position should be hired based on their skin color or any other attribute has lost their minds. This means hiring less qualified people and this is unacceptable for the airlines. All airlines should be hiring only the best and most qualified regardless of protected status so long as that hire is the very best of candidates.
I can comfortably say to the question: “were they ever compromising safety?” Without a doubt, yes. Somewhere, safety has been compromised. Where? I haven’t a clue. Maybe some guesses but not specifically. Had safety never been compromised somewhere, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
I totally support DEI hiring if it means less MAGA on my plane.
I only wish the current Administration hired based on ability. It seems the only qualification for White House jobs is us the willingness to kiss up to the boss.
If we look at the American Airlines Flight 5342 crash, it wasn’t the pilots with more than 1500 hours of flight training time that made the mistakes.
TBH, only redneck white boys from Texas should be flying planes. Situation solved.
The pendulum swings, sometimes too far out of acceptable standards, as it did with affirmative action and the resulting reverse discrimination lawsuits of decades past. In any field, the ideal standard would be to choose the best qualified available at any given time. Any type of quota or carve-out that sidestep that, almost by definition will result in less qualified people in positions. Put everyone who meets standards in a hiring pool. Then pick the best out of that pool, regardless of gender, national origin, sexual preference of any other irrelevant characteristic. Anything less than that makes an employer a target for being put under the microscope and raising questions in the event of any type of safety related issue. Also, it is troublesome for those employees that fall into a certain demographic to be constantly defending themselves, their experience and professionalism vs. being a product of a hiring quota of some sort. Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes…
@Wileydog, well stated.
Even if there were no proven cases of unqualified pilots slipping through, that misses the point. Hiring decisions should be based solely on merit, skill, judgment, and psychological fitness, not immutable characteristics like race or sex. The moment those traits enter the equation, the process stops being purely competency based and starts drifting toward identity based preferences, which, at the very least, inevitably erodes confidence in the system. A merit only standard is not just fairer, it is the clearest and most defensible way to preserve both safety and public trust.
DEI, at its core, attempts to correct past discrimination by introducing new forms of discrimination, substituting group identity for individual evaluation. That doesn’t fix anything. When MLK said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” I think he meant it quite literally. And I think far too many people, albeit with perfectly good and admirable intentions, have decided to ignore Dr. King’s wishes in favor of something that turns out to be a different brand of the same toxin. And ironically, every bit as evil. Good intentions all too often pave the road to hell.
When you have a decision-making body, like a corporate board, there is an argument for diversity since it may lead to different opinions being raised. I have seen this in my work in the Canadian federal government. But on a plane, there are (usually) only two pilots, maybe a few more for ultra long-haul. And it’s not really a place where opinions should be raised or even matter. Most decisions are routine, and to the extent they are not, I would not expect them to differ by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. So the rationale for diversity doesn’t make sense for pilot hiring.
Bravo! Anyone who thinks hiring 50% black/female lesser qualified minority pilots doesn’t place a bunch of pilots who have no business in the cockpit is a moron. It hasn’t stopped. Kirby has just stopped running his mouth off about it as he bends with the political winds. The sooner we purge this nonsense out of all hiring, admissions and extra qualification credit, the better off it will he for all!
This input may not exactly be ‘popular’, and I apologize ahead of time to anyone who takes issue with some clear language …:
1. Safety is an absolute No. 1 in air travel
2. Hiring of pilots absolutely MUST be based on qualification
The whole diversity idea is flawed:
– It professes to create equality and hire independent of race, religion, etc.
– What it really does is hire depending on race, religion etc.
I have yet to see a company dealing with this in a common-sense instead of an ideological manner.
I do not care one bit what color of skin my pilot has or how they pray … I want them to fly me safely, and I want them to be top-qualified for that job.
Thank you
If you read the NTSB report on Atlas Air/Prime Air flight 3691 in February 2019 and or the NTSB report on United flight 702 in July 2023 then the answer is yes, these pilot were DEI hires.
Openly racist Trump administration doing racist things. A day that ends in -y.
You can pretend to intellectualize this topic, but pro-or-anti DEI is just culture war nonsense, mostly red meat for right-wing bigots who can’t stand non-whites and non-straight men in positions of authority.
The reality is that becoming a pilot is less about identity or any particular background, and more about economics. It costs a lot to put in the hours to become certified and maintain licenses. Without meaningful financial support (including the military background, because that’s how a lot get their training), it’s the poor, even if would-be talented pilots, who cannot enter this profession by lack of means.
No matter how many times it is said, the anti-DEI folk never seem to listen. But, I will say it again, DEI is NOT about hiring less qualified people, it is about getting the word out to all segments of society so that truly the best can be hired.
When I was hired into ZOB in 1974, I only knew about the openings because a good friend who was an ATC at CAK told me the FAA was hiring controllers.
@Retard (er, 1990) – I am openly gay and strongly oppose DEI.
Putting that aside, dismissing concerns about DEI as nothing more than “red meat for right-wing bigots” is not an argument, it is an attempt to shut down debate by assigning motive instead of engaging substance. Reasonable people can oppose the use of race or sex in hiring without harboring animus toward anyone. The core objection is not to “non-whites” or “non-straight men” in authority, it is to any system that treats immutable characteristics as relevant in professional selection. Reducing that position to prejudice lazily avoids grappling with the principled case for merit-based standards. But I would certainly expect nothing less from you.
On the other hand, you are absolutely right (shocker, I know) that economics is a major barrier to becoming a pilot. The cost of flight hours, ratings, and recurrent training is substantial, and military pathways have historically played an outsized role. But that reality actually undercuts identity-based hiring preferences; it strengthens the case for socioeconomic solutions. If the real bottleneck is financial access, then scholarships, low-interest financing, expanded ROTC style programs, airline-funded cadet pipelines, and broader training subsidies address the root problem without introducing race or sex as decision criteria. Targeting economic barriers directly is both fairer and more precise.
Keep the hate up, boys! Left, right, black, white, Hell is an equal-opportunity, non-discriminatory residence! Come on, down, the water (heh, heh, heh) is warm!
@Mike
Sanitizing and minimizing race and sex as simply ‘immutable characteristics’ is about as foolish as attempting to gain credibility by stating that you’re a (presumably white) gay male. This isn’t 1970.
The fact is that pilot hiring uses a scoring system, at least for the major US airlines. If a black female pilot and a white male pilot score into the same range, what argument do you have for why United or another carrier should not select the black female pilot over the male pilot?
As for your argument against using race or sex in hiring decisions, I would generally agree that it shouldn’t factor, but there are many public-facing positions where representation is important. Cops, lawyers, doctors, pilots, and flight attendants among other positions are all positions where it’s extremely important that the public see that those in public facing-positions represent them, look like them. I wouldn’t fault a carrier for even consistently selecting non-white pilots for training classes over white pilots who score the same. Those non-white pilots all have to go through the same training to be able to fly. If the carriers aren’t seeing an uptick in remedial training based on hiring more non-white qualified pilots, then I’d argue there is no impact to safety. If you think the public is concerned about DEI affecting safety, you can be sure a check pilot who has been flying 20+ years mainline isn’t giving any relief.
Of course, to cover all bases, if carriers are choosing to hire more non-white male pilots with lower scores than those white male pilots, that could be risking safety, though I’d want to see if there was an uptick in remedial training for those pilots who were hired.
Lastly, I think it should be noted that pilot hiring had a moment during the pandemic where ALL pilots being hired were closer to ATP minimums than they had recently been. It used to be that a pilot would spend thousands of hours flying at the regionals before a major carrier would hire them and during the pandemic we saw pilots being hired from regionals as FOs going straight to widbody FOs at Delta and United.
Hire based on capability and skill, and don’t restrict the field of candidates. Unions put up walls to block entry, and those need to be removed. Charities could fund training for impecunious candidates, ideally repayable when they land jobs.
@DFW Flyer – First of all, spare me the psychologizing. Reducing a principled argument about merit to “this isn’t 1970” or insinuations about identity is exactly the kind of shallow rhetorical move that substitutes sneering for substance. Calling race and sex “immutable characteristics” is not sanitizing anything, it is stating a biological and legal fact. Mentioning that I’m gay was not an appeal to authority or a bid for credibility, it was a direct rebuttal to the lazy assumption that opposition to DEI must stem from hostility toward minorities. It demonstrates that someone can belong to a historically marginalized group and still reject identity-based hiring on principle. In other words, the point was to challenge his dumb stereotype, not to leverage my identity as an argument.
Now to your scoring example. If a black female pilot and a white male pilot score in the same band, the argument for not preferring one over the other on the basis of race or sex is simple, because race and sex are irrelevant to flying an airplane. Equal scores mean equal demonstrated qualifications under the airline’s own rubric. Once you say “we’ll break the tie using race,” you have explicitly made race a deciding factor. That is discrimination, even if you believe it is morally justified. The fact that the candidate still goes through training is beside the point. The question is whether race should be used as a selection criterion at all. If the answer is yes, then you have abandoned race neutrality as a governing principle.
As for “representation” in public-facing roles, the public’s confidence in a pilot should rest on competence, not on whether the pilot “looks like them.” We do not require heart surgeons to mirror the demographic profile of their patients in order to operate safely. We require them to be excellent. If an airline wants to broaden the pipeline, fantastic! Fund scholarships and do other things to address economic barriers, as you correctly note. But once candidates reach the hiring board, the only defensible standard is merit as measured by objective criteria. Otherwise, you are no longer saying “the best qualified person gets the job.” You are saying “the best qualified person gets the job, unless we prefer someone else’s identity.” That is nothing but bigotry dressed up as virtue.
On the pandemic hiring point, yes, standards tightened and loosened with market forces. That was about experience levels and certainly not race. If you are worried about minimum-hour hires going straight to widebody FOs, then your concern is about experience thresholds, not identity. Keep the debate where it belongs, on competence. The moment you argue that race is a legitimate tie-breaker because it makes the cabin look more representative, you have conceded the core issue. In any given profession (never mind one where safety is paramount) racial and sexual identity should be irrelevant, always.
I do not think in 40 years I have ever seen a Non-White pilot on a US airline EVER. Diversity in pilots just does not happen . It is a all white man’s job. There may be a women here or there but that is rear.
there are more black bears in Maine then there are Black people. Worded that way for context
Been on Asiana, Japan air, British Air, Fin Air and others and still all white men or the equivalent
Can we say racist jobs.
It will certainly be reassuring to know that pilots have been recruited solely on all aspects of their suitability.
Nevertheless I will continue to avoid any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.
@Mike Hunt — That’s a lot of noise you got there. (By the way, finally made it back to SIN, and I still prefer T3 SQ lounges over all else there. Also, separately, been seeing a lot of JSX ads in NYC, promoting those TEB flights.)
The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 specifically says, “SEC. 202. All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin, if such discrimination or segregation is or purports to be required by any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, rule, or order of a State or any agency or political subdivision thereof.” Now this is just a small segment of the act signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. DEI goes completely against the law. Everybody should get an equal footing to the “start line”. At that point, merit should be a major deciding factor in any corporate hiring. I don’t care about a person’s race. “Equity”- again based on merit nothing else. “Inclusion” – fine I don’t care in the workplace but make restrooms like those in Europe. The toilet cubicles are floor to ceiling private. The sinks are open to both sexes. Dressing/locker rooms…I have to draw a line there.
The industry needs broad outreach if it wants to create new pipelines for future pilots. Everyone meets the base qualifications. That’s the law. There aren’t enough coming from those legacy pipelines to satisfy demand.
I have flow on airlines from the USA, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, China, Malaysia and Singapore. The surnames of the pilots have almost always been from the country the airline was based in. So I would say in aggregate that I have flown on more airline segments with all or most of the flight deck crew being not of European descent. The cabin crews were the same way. I do not see racism as part of the hiring practice.
If anything was prioritized over merit and competence, then of course safety was compromised. Doesn’t mean it would result in planes immediately falling out of the sky, but the risk is undoubtedly higher when the best and brightest are passed over. Now if people were elevated due to a mental health issue, such as believing one is something they objectively are not, then that’s obviously a massive safety issue and an incredibly stupid policy.
Mike absolutely dunking on the dummies in the comments. Mike argues facts, and makes solid arguments and you (1990) STILL can only retort with “noise”. Shameful.
“No matter how many times it is said, the anti-DEI folk never seem to listen. But, I will say it again, DEI is NOT about hiring less qualified people, it is about getting the word out to all segments of society so that truly the best can be hired.”
You highlight the problem. I say I’m against having race/sex/etc. being used for hiring/promotion/etc. and the “pro-DEI” folks say, no, no, we just want to get the word out. We’ll if DEI is just spreading the word, then I’m for DEI. But, then the “pro DEI” hardliners will sneak in discrimination. I’m tired of this constant redefinition to hid the true intent (to discriminate).
@DFW Flyer
“If a black female pilot and a white male pilot score into the same range, what argument do you have for why United or another carrier should not select the black female pilot over the male pilot?”
Because it’s discrimination based on race or gender and it violates the equal protection clause of the US Constitution (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC). The race and gender of the applicant are not relevant qualifications.
BTW, while I oppose any government mandated discrimination in hiring and the like, they did do one related thing I find concerning. Government funded health-related studies used to be required to actively recruit subjects so both XX and XY folks and a wide spectrum of racial and ethnic groups are represented. The mandate was removed. I suspect that most researchers will continue this anyway. But, this is one form of discrimination I can support.
I bet the “diversity” program wasn’t fully quashed. Even though all hires are fully legal (1500 hrs with ATP) I’m willing to bet that they are still using diversity edged experience as a criteria and then they got their whistles blown.
The data shows DEI is dangerous.
Nothing wrong with expanding the talent pool — at all.
But I worked with these hiring quotas.
Anyone involved with them at the US3 can tell you there was a minimum standard. Once that was met, it was all women and black men to the quick of the line as quickly as possible.
It was to the point of a game which of the US3 could hire the black female or male pilot as quickly as possible to boost their diversity numbers.
To be clear, no white males were harmed during this but there’s also no need to turn a blind eye to how silly it had become in hiring practices at HR of the US3
@tomri you have led a sheltered life. I have seen many a black pilot in my travels. As a matter of fact, I personally know one who had a long and very storied career on a US Airline who now retired was for many years a Chief Pilot. He was one hell of a Pilot and one hell of a Man. And, incidentally, that same Airline had many Women in the Cockpit, who are as qualified as any man out there.
Through many years I have met all manner of people in the Airline Industry who were good at their jobs. The only thing I care about when boarding a plane is that they get me where I am going in the same condition I was when I boarded. Nothing more important than safety.
Gary Leff – obviolusly a LEFT-wing DEI promoter. Who starts and article with….”despite zero evidence”. That’s your job – go get the evidence, there’s plenty of it!!! Typical journalism….. go back to Brown University where DEI practices are encouraged – not the friendly skies, thank you.
@Michael Hunt I’m sure you think that being gay gives you some higher moral authority over this topic, but it doesn’t. It makes you an Uncle Tom.
If you have a debate ON MERIT WITH DATA about the harm of DEI programs let’s talk. I’ll tell you what I see in healthcare…while we debate how many brown kids we should let into medical school dozens of diploma mills have opened, degrading quality. So, if you have enough money you can get in and make it through. If you’re poor or brown forget about it.
America was built on diversity and freedoms from oppression. If you are anti-diversity you are unamerican. Plan and simple.
@Parker – Let’s begin with the obvious. Calling a gay man an “Uncle Tom” because he refuses to endorse identity politics is not an argument, it is an insult masquerading as moral clarity. It proves my exact point. The modern DEI mindset does not actually celebrate diversity of thought, it polices it. The moment someone from a minority group refuses to conform ideologically, you strip them of agency and assign them a pejorative label. And then you try to call it inclusion. Talk about hypocrisy!
You say, “Let’s debate on merit with data.” Good. Then let’s be very precise, shall we? For a concrete data point on the costs of identity prioritization in selection systems, consider the decades-long Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, where internal admissions data revealed that Asian American applicants, who on average scored higher on grades and test scores than many admitted peers, were consistently rated lower on subjective traits to artificially limit their admission numbers. That meant applicants with objectively stronger academic credentials were denied admission because of their race, a real harm to both fairness and academic quality. Analysts documented that racial considerations effectively suppressed Asian American admit rates despite superior scores, illustrating how race-based criteria can warp merit-based decision making. That’s blatant racism, plain and simple.
The argument against DEI in pilot hiring, or any safety critical profession, is not that diversity is bad. It is that race and sex are irrelevant performance variables. If you want to talk about diploma mills in healthcare, I agree, standards matter. If wealthy applicants can buy their way through inferior institutions, that is a problem of credential integrity and regulatory failure, not an argument for injecting race into hiring decisions. Fix standards. Enforce rigor. Expand opportunity at the front end through scholarships and pipeline programs. But once candidates reach the hiring or admissions threshold, selection should be blind to immutable traits.
And please spare me the “anti diversity is un-American” slogan. America was built on equal protection under the law and individual rights. The civil rights movement did not argue for “reversing” discrimination. It argued for ENDING it. A system that sorts candidates by race to achieve a preferred demographic outcome is not neutral, it is intentional differentiation. You may believe it is justified. Fine. Make that case honestly. But do not pretend that opposing race conscious decision making is somehow anti freedom. The most American principle of all is this: individuals rise or fall based on their own merits, not the color of their skin, their genitalia, or whom they choose to love.
DEI is good for the industry, good for safety and good for society.
Hiring and retaining cookie-cutter in-group ethnic and sex/gender types is generally unnecessarily expensive, increases safety risks, and damages society writ large.
Parker seems to know this: Peter Thiel is a racist and sexist gay “white” man — no shortage of racist and even sexist “white” men of various sexual orientations.
I’m stunned to think that a pilot could ever have been hired based an anything other than his or her ability to be a pilot. Good for the administration for making this that this is what actually happens.