The DOT’s order requiring U.S. airlines to certify that they don’t hire pilots based on race or sex will have little to no real-world impact, according to stakeholders involved with pilot hiring.

“I don’t think it’s going to change anything,” said Judy Tarver, a former American Airlines pilot recruitment manager who has coached airline pilot applicants since the 1990s. “I think that the airlines don’t discriminate. They try to hire the most qualified people.”

The DOT said it issued the Feb. 13 mandate due to ongoing allegations of airlines using DEI practices in pilot hiring, though the department did not respond to requests for further information on those allegations.

Failure by airlines to commit to merit-based hiring will subject them to federal investigation.

The U.S. airline pilot profession has historically been white-male dominated.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year women comprised 7% of people working in the U.S. as aircraft pilots or flight engineers, while Blacks made up 3.8%, Latinos or Hispanics accounted for 6.8% and Asians accounted for 1.6%. Those numbers are imperfect, since they include all working pilots, not just those at commercial airlines. All are well below general U.S. demographics.

Boeing projects that North American airlines will need to hire 119,000 pilots by 2045 to keep up with attrition, retirement and growth. U.S. airlines have already endured pilot shortages both before and immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic.

As such, airlines view it as in their interest to expand the field of potential pilots through more engagement with women and minorities, said Tim Genc, a former director of pilot recruiting for regional carrier Air Wisconsin. Genc now runs the aviation program at College of DuPage near Chicago.

“If our cadre of future pilots is only white guys, that’s a small percentage of the population of the world,” Genc said. “We have a larger pool to pick from if our net is a whole lot bigger. We are still only going to take the best of the best.”

Genc, along with other industry stakeholders, noted that for a pilot to even be eligible to fly commercially they must undergo the lengthy process of obtaining an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) license, which requires up to 1,500 hours of flying as well as passing a checkride (oral and flight examinations) and a written test. Airlines also train hires in their own programs before putting them in the cockpit.

But while he said airlines don’t compromise on hiring standards, Genc did say that concerted efforts are being made to draw more women and people of color into pilot schools.

Much of that work is being done by nonprofits, including Women in Aviation and the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP), among others. OBAP awarded $1.3 million in scholarships last year, mostly to aspiring pilot trainees, said the group’s chairman, Tennessee Garvey, a first officer at United. Among OBAP’s sponsors are United, Delta, American, Southwest, Alaska and JetBlue.

United offers an especially sharp example of a major airline’s effort to boost the playing field for pilot recruits.

In 2021, as it prepared to become the only mainline U.S. carrier to operate its own flight school, United announced a goal that half of the students who graduate this decade would be either women or people of color.

“We are confident that by tapping new reservoirs of talent, we will continue to build a stronger airline,” chief communications officer Josh Earnest said at the time. The airline declined comment on whether that goal remains in place.

Garvey, while asserting that airlines only hire the best candidates, said the Trump administration’s pushback against DEI is making it more difficult to recruit diverse aviation workers.

“It’s actually discouraging those who are Black, those who are female, from coming to this space,” he said.

But not all pilots agree that such outreach is necessary, said Louis Smith, CEO of the Future and Active Pilots Alliance (FAPA), which runs pilot job fairs.

“During the last 30 years, I have spoken with hundreds of white, male pilots, and most think the industry is applying too much ‘left rudder’ in the pilot-hiring process,” Smith wrote in an email.

Pilot career services consultant Kit Darby said that until around 2010, he maintained a 15,000-person database of pilots. Women and candidates of color, he said, were hired a year or two younger on average than white men, with slightly less flight experience.

Darby said the trend line appears similar now from the more limited data he sees, though he said the impact on pilot quality is negligible.

“I’m very comfortable with the quality of people being hired by the airlines,” he said.