Originally Posted by
Big4Flyer
Anyone who has children plays with the odds of their children's well-being. Bringing your child on a plane, even in a car seat, is playing with their well-being, so is letting your kid play at the park, or even leave the house.
My point is just to show that we all make a series of decisions to balance things that we feel will improve our life with things that would risk it. Just to show why someone might choose not to bring a carseat on a plane: The cost of a human life is estimated by the DoT at around $6M, and during 2015 there were over 3.3 billion passengers flown by commercial airlines, with 560 deaths. If you apply that fatality rate to the expected cost of losing a loved one, and feel that a car seat would be the difference between life and death, then you would be rational to not bring a car seat on the plane if the cost to you of bringing the car seat is over $1.02, and that is supposing that the car seat would prevent any death, which, when you look at a list of all commercial aviation disasters in 2015, I don't see a single one where a car seat would have saved a child.
However, we don't use information like this when making decision, we use our perceptions of the danger of something as well as our estimate of how painful that loss would be to us, both of which are incredibly subjective. This is the very reason why it may not be worth it to you to fly without a car seat, but for others it is.
All I think any parent should ask, is what would they pay to get their child back to good health or resurrect them from death if they were injured or killed after they played the odds (which are clearly in their favor) and took them on a plan as a lap infant. I think parents would say they couldn't put a price on that as they'd pay whatever it took. So why not pay the added cost for a seat and put the odds even more in your favor that a child will be as safe as possible on a plane.
The only reason kids under 2 are allowed to be in a lap and not restrained is because of statistics. Statistically, someone is safer flying then driving and the thought is if kids under 2 were required to have their own seat, more parents would choose driving over flying.
Not all kids are equal though. I'm actually surprised its an age requirement when at best it should be a size requirement. If my 15 month old son was in my lap and there was severe turbulence and I couldn't hold him, he'd become a 25lb missle and could not only be injured himself, but could injure others.
It is hard to find many instances where something happened, but there have been cases where an infant flew from their parents arms into another seat. Fortunately they were ok. But why take that chance just to save some money? As I said, any parent who had the very poor luck of getting hit with those odds (who here hasn't played powerball though?) and having their kid injured or killed wouldn't go back in time and pay whatever it took?
I know if I didn't get a seat and properly restrain my son and something happened, I'd never forgive myself. There is only so much you can do, but this is a pretty simple step.