Pilots at Hawaiian Airlines will have to shave off their beards later this month as part of the carrier’s merger with Alaska Airlines, as they seek to standardize operations under a single operating certificate.
Unlike many U.S.-based carriers, pilots at Hawaiian Airlines have been able to wear beards for many years. Part of the reason is due to cultural sensitivities in Hawaii, as well as a differing interpretation of guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
That, however, will change on April 20, when Hawaiian Airlines makes a “significant” change to its Flight Operations Manual, with pilots at a Honolulu-based carrier transitioning to the same uniform and appearance standards as their coworkers at Alaska Airlines.
The FAA has never banned pilots from wearing beards, but an advisory circular dating back nearly four decades warned that special air-tight oxygen masks used by pilots might not work properly with the presence of facial hair that might break the air-tight seal.
Airlines have long used this guidance to ban pilots from having beards or other forms of facial hair, although the FAA has explicitly prohibited pilots from having beards.
Hawaiian Airlines was a rare exception, but following the merger with Alaska Airlines, the combined carrier is standardizing operating protocols under a single operator’s certificate.
Although Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines will operate as seperate and unique brands, under the hood, everything will be the same, including uniform and grooming rules.
As first reported by Airline Geeks, the Alaska Airlines Group chief pilot, Scott Day, told pilots at Hawaiian that “going forward, facial hair must meet specific requirements to ensure compliance with FAA guidance and flight deck safety, and beards will not be authorized.”
After facing a backlash from bearded pilots, the Alaska Airlines Group vice president of flight operations, Dave Mets, attempted to calm tensions, saying:
“I fully understand that this is a policy decision many of you do not and may never agree with.”
Mets added that the airline had “absolutely no desire or intention to diminish the way Hawaiian Airlines and/or Hawaiian culture is celebrated and respected within our combined company.”
One of the reasons that the issue of pilot facial hair is so contentious is that more recent research has cast a significant amount of doubt on claims that a beard could interfere with the special oxygen masks used by pilots.
Last year, the Journal of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance published a study by researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University 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.
That being said, in 2025, Australian flag carrier Qantas moved to ban pilots from having beards at its short-haul QantasLink subsidiary after a safety review by the British defense and aerospace company QinetiQ concluded that beards did have the potential to interfere with a quick-donning pilot oxygen system.
In other words, the jury remains out as to whether facial hair can interfere with pilot oxygen masks, or not. In the meantime, many airlines defer back to FAA guidance, which hasn’t changed since 1987 when it was first published.
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