Air Canada to allow pilots to have beards thanks to research from SFU

BURNABY (NEWS 1130) – Air Canada will be changing its policy about beards and pilots thanks to research out of Simon Fraser University.

The previous prohibition on facial hair had nothing to do with style, but whether the pilot’s oxygen masks would still work with a beard, according to the airline.

But, when a Sikh man — who couldn’t cut his beard for religious reasons — applied to be a pilot, AirCanada asked SFU Director of Environmental Medicine and Physiology Sherri Ferguson to put the long-held belief to the test.

“They realized that potentially this could be a human rights issue if they did not have research behind their decision-making policies,” Ferguson said, noting the rules had been based on papers that had been written in the 70s and 60s. “So they called us and asked us if we could design a way to tests the masks.”

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Her team tested whether beards would prevent masks from properly keeping away toxic fumes or providing pilots with oxygen if needed.

“We were able to confirm that regardless of beard length, providing the mask was in positive pressure mode, it protected them 100 per cent from any drop in blood-oxygen saturation level,” she said.

Positive pressure mode, also known as “free flow” mode, is when the mask is constantly flowing some oxygen so the pressure inside the masks is higher than the surrounding pressure, Ferguson explained.

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She said their research is getting a lot of attention, noting she was surprised about how much the findings meant to some of the non-Sikh pilots too. Ferguson said their findings have also caught the attention of other industries.

“That took me back more than the results of our study,” she said.

Air Canada will now be changing their policy based on this research.

WestJet told NEWS 1130 that its pilots have been able to have short beards for about a year now.