baby car seats?
Friday, July 31st, 2009 at
7:54 pm
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If car seats are required in cars, I don’t see why planes are any different.
I was a Flight Attendant for 13 years and I really hated seeing little ones on parents’ laps. I knew that if anything happened, they would go flying through the cabin, and have in accidents.
By contrast, the baby will stay in a car seat if the plane goes UPSIDE DOWN. As far as safety is concerned, a car seat is the ONLY way to fly safely with a baby.
Lap children are allowed because flying is so safe and the chances of anything going wrong are so slim. The airlines want to sell tickets and parents want to save money so this practice continues. Even after the Sioux City crash, nothing changed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232#cite_note-ntsb-2
In a prepared emergency landing, parents are instucted to put their lap babies on the floor and hold them there.
Also, checking car seats is a bad idea. It risks their being damaged and/or lost. Then how are they supposed to leave the airport? While looking for my lost baggage on my last flight, I saw at least 2 seats and wondered just that (but we used ours’ on board so my daughter was safe on the way home).
Airlines don’t help parents get car seats to the gate and burden them unfairly with all sorts of regulations. Code-shared international flights mean that my seat has been removed because it wasn’t approved by the "right" authorities. F/A’s are often ill-informed about child safetly too.
There’s also the mentality that since it’s been so long that children have been flying in laps, why stop?
By the way, children are safer loose in the adults’ lap. Some foreign airlines still use dangerous "belly belts" which attach to the adults’ seat belt and turn the child into a "human air bag" on forward impact. The CAA (British) justifies it saying it doesn’t want injuries from flying children so they’re used to protect other passengers, not the children.
Both the FAA and the AAP recommend car seats to be used inflight;
http://www.aap.org/family/carseatguide.htm
http://www.faa.gov/passengers/fly_children/crs/
Here is more information if you want to read more;
http://www.carseatsite.com/links.htm#Flying%20with%20Baby
So because of marketing and practical reasons, I doubt this rule will change soon.
I work for and Airline….A child under 2 is considered a lap child and may sit on your lap for free, however if you buy a ticket for them they would require a car seat. Children 2 or older need a ticket, a car seat is suggested but not required. It is ultimately the parents call…a lot of them don’t want to hassle with the car seat. I highly recommend having one.
It is highly recommended that parents pay for a seat and use a car seat for their infants on planes. Airlines do give parents the choice tho. Accidents are much, much less common in airplanes than in cars so that is probably a large part of the reason. Someone posted some figures on answers yesterday stating that you have a one in 100,000 chance of being in a car accident and a one in six million chance of being in an airplane crash.
Why? Because airlines figure they’ll lose money if they require tickets for everyone, even though they should. And that they’ll lose money if they require appropriate restraints for all ages. Yes, the risk of plane crash is low, and in a plane crash, a car seat may not help that much. but turbulence and other problems are common, and a car seat does protect in those instances. Its dumb that everyone over 2 years has to be protected in their own seat, but we don’t want to provide our babies with that same protection.