Does Airline Safety Correlate with Diversity?

There is no extant literature examining this exact question, so I accessed a variety of sources to compile available data. I researched U.S. scheduled air carriers from the earliest days of aviation to today, including the composition of the airline pilot profession with regards to white, Black, male, and female identified pilots, and statistics on passenger and crew fatalities from scheduled air carrier accidents (those from intentional acts were omitted). 

Scheduled flight operations have carried the U.S. mail since 1911 and passengers since 1914, but records of scheduled air carrier accidents and fatalities were not kept prior to 1927, as far as I could determine. What the available data show is that fatal accidents were fairly common for the nascent airline industry, although scheduled air carrier flights were few and the aircraft held small numbers of passengers. For example, from 1930 through 1939, there were a total of 94 accidents resulting in 349 fatalities. 

The fatal accident rate was also relatively high in the 1950s through the 1970s, as jet aircraft were introduced that carried larger numbers of passengers, and pilot training and procedures did not keep pace with advancements in technology and operations. From 1970 through 1979, there were 56 accidents resulting in 2303 fatalities. 

As for the airline pilot profession, it was all-male and all-white for the first six decades of air travel, with the brief exception of one woman pilot hired in 1934 who ended up quitting when she wasn’t permitted to join the pilot union or to fly in adverse weather, despite being as qualified as the men pilots. 

In 1963 an airline hired a Black pilot for the first time, and he joined the 18,310 airline pilots and flight engineers employed by all the U.S. airlines at the time. Within two years, there were a total of four Black men airline pilots. The profession remained virtually all-male until 1973, when four white women pilots were hired by four different airlines in the same year. In 1978 when the first Black woman airline pilot was hired, there were approximately 110 Black men and 77 white women airline pilots among the 35,768 airline pilots and flight engineers. 

Today the U.S. airlines continue to grow and to hire qualified Black pilots and women pilots, however the representation and rate of hiring are not as high as many perceive it to be. The profession is currently estimated to be about 92 percent white and 95 percent male. Black women airline pilots are scarce; my independent research estimates that their number is 120 in total, or about 0.1 percent (one-tenth of one percent) of all U.S. airline pilots. 

Meanwhile, airline safety has seen significant improvement in modern times, with an overall reduction in accidents. While rare, accidents with fatalities still occur, as recent tragedies have shown. Thorough investigations to determine causal factors and a relentless focus on improvements to aircraft design, flight simulators, pilot training, and crew standardization, and other risk mitigation and safety enhancement initiatives, remain industry-wide priorities. 

The accompanying graphic has the following data plotted: Number in thousands of Black pilots, women pilots, and Black women pilots, and fatalities from accidents for U.S. air carriers, 1927 to February 23, 2025. 

Conclusion:  As the graphic shows, the trend of an increase in Black and women airline pilots coincides with a decrease in fatalities from U.S. airline accidents. There is no evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between airline accidents and pilots from historically excluded populations. 

Sources: Airlines for America; Broadnax, 2007; Douglas, 2004; Ebony Magazine, 1965-2006; Gubert, Sawyer & Finnan, 2002; Hardesty & Pisano, 1983; International Society of Women Airline Pilots; Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals; Sisters of the Skies; U.S. DOL Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. DOT Federal Aviation Administration; U.S. DOT National Transportation Safety Board. 

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