Babie's
 

When are airlines going to require "car seats" for babies instead of lap kids.

I was on a flight last week where hit an air pocket and a lap baby went flying along with several lap tops, etc. The stew said quite common.

It's going to take some horrific incident, and have to overcome a lot of $ concerns from families travelling.

Internationally, they change 10% of full coach, which can make it cheaper to buy the little projectile it's own seat. But domestically...

"Why should I have to spend $x just for little Billy? He can sit on my lap for the hour... Yeah, right, Ms. BStrauss3 was actually BIT by one of the little monsters who thought sis's seat was a jungle gym.

I think the little ones s/b in cages. "Please remember to put your children in the larger overhead bins on the DEF side. If you put them in grille first, three children can fit in each overhead. If you've brought both a rollerboard and child on, decide now which one you want to check, bring it to the front and we'll be happy to check it to your final destination."

----Burton

That image sounds like something out of a Tim Burton movie.

Now how about the preteens and teens that insist on kicking the seat back in front of them for the duration of the flight? Wife called once as I was deplaning and asked how it was. Told her that I had my remaining kidney massaged for most of the flight by a child whose inconsiderate mother did nothing. Funny thing was that the mother was quite angry when she overheard my side of the conversation.

Unlikely.

And unfortunately, but it takes a lot more than one person dying for the FAA to mandate changes.

Unfortunately, people care more about $ than their kids.

ie

Lets buy the old car for our new 16 yo driver. Who cares if it does not have air bags nor shoulder belts. If he wrecks it, it is cheap.

I don't know where the URL is now, but there was a stew union where they kept track of the number of babies hurt.

Maybe the FA said something?
 

Could not have been last week. IIRC, the PC Police removed the "stew" from commercial flights about 20 years ago. :D

Other than the fact that I still fondly remember the "coffee, tea or me" days (even had one recently who remembered "the turtle club"); you need to fly Singapore Air. They still have the stews of yesteryears. The women "FA"s are all young and gorgeous. If they exceed tight restictions on size, they are out. After two years (might be slightly more), they are out and get great jobs outside based on their resume. The male "FAs" are long termers.

It is not going to happen since more babies will be killed if instituted. The Gov't did a study and found that if the policy was instituted more families would then drive instead of flying due to the additional cost. And, since flying is much safer than driving, more babies would die. The study actually gave an estimated number of additional deaths.

The same can also be said of the TSA. More people are driving than did before due to the some of the screening procedures.

True, the study was done. However, if you look at it, it did not have the kids belted in car seats in the cars. Looking at the data of accidents with kids belted in cars, there are rare kids killed if they are seated properly. So, the injury risk remains lower for kids in cars than in airplanes. The same does not hold for their parents

The only way to fly.
 

Spoiler Alert: :p Two years ago I had the experience of spending 17 hours in SQ F on the LAX-SIN nonstop being pampered by a sweeeet young thing. ^ It will spoil all your other flying. :D

Um, yeah. That pricing you're stating may be for flights leaving during the Carter Administration, but these days it's roughly 10% of adult fare for a lap infant and 75% of adult fare for kids under two in their own seat internationally. And they don't get miles for that. U.S. flag carriers don't allow lap infants for long-haul international flights at all.

Throw in the way that the airlines have bowed to pressure from status members to not allow those traveling with small children to board early, making securing a car seat that much more aggravating all around, and you have the reasons you don't see a lot of kids in car seats.

If the airline really wanted to solve the problem, they'd give you the option of having a car seat already in place at the kid's seat when you board. For a modest fee of course. If I can order a kids' meal on booking and they can get that right, I should be able to get a car seat.

Rare, but rarer than the rates of babies killed in airplanes without being in car seats?
Do you have a link to a study backing this up? So you're saying that requiring a purchase of seats for infants would result in fewer dead infants, but more injured parents?

Be careful what you wish for. If an airline would be providing that seat, it would have to meet a Technical Standard Order. If they’re going to go to the trouble and considerable expense of having TSO’d baby seats available, I don’t think there would be a modest fee involved.

Heck, for good measure they would probably make it an OpSpec that *only* those seats could be used.

EDIT: Does it show that I don’t have kids? I knew of a label on baby seats that said they were approved for use on aircraft, but as it turns out there is a TSO.

Why exactly do we need to change the rules? Are people forbidden from strapping their child into a car seat (they may be, I don't know). If they are allowed to do so, those that value the extra safety will do so. I understand that there may be some sort of negative externality here: a flying child could hit and injure someone else, but there are far more laptops and dvd players on a flight.

I don't really feel like I want to FAA telling some parent how to travel with their child if there is no effect on me whether they lock them down or not.

The other problem with passing the rule is that it will raise the cost of flying. Since flying parents with kids will be much more price sensitive, the airline would be smart to cross-subsidize that cost to more inelastic travelers, thus also raising ticket prices for those traveling without kids.

cpar
I guess a kid's life is not worth extra cost to you.

That is not the correct question to ask. I think a child's life is absolutely worth the cost. In fact, I would never, ever, let my child fly without a car seat. I think you'd be crazy to do so. My point is that many parents don't feel this way. We make these sorts of choices all the time. Cars come with three point seat belts, planes come with two-point seat belts, except for the crew. We would ALL be safer if we had five point seat belts, but this would increase cost, and so we choose not to do so. I don't think we need to legislate things because parent make different choices than I would.

I was allowed to each Froot Loops and Sugar Smacks growing up. My parents certainly did not want a law passed because doing so increased my risk of cavities.

I am an economist, and there does not seem to be a reason to legislate people's choices just because they do not agree with you or I.

What an ignorant statement!

According to this 1990 article, http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-011.html

"In a study prepared for the FAA, Department of Transportation researchers concluded that mandatory infant safety seats could have prevented at most only one infant death since 1978. All other infant fatalities in airline crashes occurred in sections of planes where no one survived.[11] On the other hand, nearly 1,200 children under five years of age were killed in automobile accidents in 1988.[12] That means that there were approximately one-quarter more automobile deaths of very young children in 1988 alone than there were total deaths of children and adults on scheduled airlines during the entire 1980-88 period.[13]"

Why would it be crazy to take an infant on a flight without a car seat? Seems rational to me. Don't you think the money spent on the plane ticket for the infant could be much more effectively used by putting it toward installation of fire sprinklers in the home where your child sleeps?

Do you carry your infant on an escalator without a car seat? Stairs? Is it absolutely crazy to do so? Is it any more dangerous than taking your infant on a flight without a car seat?

But what the study does not tell you is how many kids ended up with brain damage or in coma. We had several a year at the Peds Trauma unit in Chicago.

As per the economist, whom do you think pays for these kids. Florida had a big push not to mandate motorcycle helmets for similar reasons you give -- until someone figured out the increased medical costs for taking care of the fools who rode without.

If you're an economist, how many plane tickets for infants (who would otherwise be flying as a lap child) would you have to buy before you saved one infant life? What would be the total cost per life saved?

DMonkey: It is impossible to hold onto a kid on your lap if the plane hits an air pocket; no correlation with escalator (and no, we did not take kid in stroller on escalator as some turkeys do). :confused:

Reminds me of Churchill when he asked the Lady if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. After she replied yes, he asked for one pound and she replied "what do you think I am". His: "we have established that, now we are negotiating the price".

How much do you think a life is worth or not being in a permanent coma?

True, and it's also impossible to avoid being killed by a drunk driver for parents in this world who needs to travel but would end up driving because they can't afford a ticket for what would otherwise be a lap child.

If you're asking my price, well, personally, I'm more than willing to take what I think is a one in two million chance that my infant will be put in a coma or killed on a flight if it will save me $500

So, if it's I guess my price is a billion dollars (2,000,000 x $500) for my child.

Is there something wrong with my math? What are the chances on a per flight basis that an unrestrained lap child will become killed or permanently injured (and would have survived with a car seat)?

According to my personal value system, the $500 would serve the child much better if I put it in his 529 plan.

Again, There were zero deaths in kids in the back middle seat with a properly fastened car seat last year in the US per the National Trauma Registry.

Man, people can't even install a car seat properly in a car. Even if mandated, I really doubt it'd help prevent much of anything.

The seat might be on the plane, but that doesn't mean jr is gonna be safe in it.

Besides the properly fastened children, what about other people in the vehicles or in other vehicles involved in those accidents?

If some families were too poor to buy plane tickets for the children but could afford a proper car seat, why would you want to give those families the incentive to drive? Wouldn't they be safer flying with the baby on someone's lap?

The baby is going to be safe even if not in a car seat.

If the baby dies on the plane, it's most likely going to be an Air France 447 situation where no car seat in the world could save him/her.

dmonkey
Again, Check with your stews and ask them how many injured kids they have seen.

As to the adults, if they can't afford it, they shouldn't fly. Guess that is why I buy first class tickets

If you called for a stew, would anyone answer?

I don't have a flight until Friday but I'll ask the FAs then. Personally, I've never seen a turbulence injury on any flight I've been on.

I did some searches trying to find statistics, and I did find this Qantas instance, which seems to be the most recent one on Google News: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sto...72-661,00.html

Seems like this Qantas event was fairly newsworthy. Google News shows that there are 334 articles worldwide about this one event. Why is this getting so much international coverage if babies are being knocked into comas on flights every day because they are not properly restrained?

Children were injured, but so were other passengers and crew too. Read about the elderly woman waiting to get into the lav.

Huh? Doesn't not flying (assuming driving is the alternative) increase the chance that adults will die in an auto wreck?

I don't get it. Why don't you spend the extra money subsidizing seats for babies that are flying, if it will really make them that much safer?

I don't know. I had one on US Air the other day who started in the 70s when she was 21 and she remembered the turtle club and the making the mile high club. Those were the days.....

I've never seen a child in a car seat on a plane. I've tried with mine and every single time, I was made to put the car seat in the overhead because they aren't meant for plane use. :confused:

They have to be FAA approved (most new ones in US are). If you have child, go to AA web site and check their store, they have nice ones that are small and mobile

I was wondering when the "But, what about the children??" crowd was going to show up. "The children" have nothing to do with ME. Getting the children to and fro is the responsibility of their parents. If they want the kids safer, THEY can pay for it.

I think it would be crazy for my child, but I acknowledge that many (most?) people don't think that. Everybody has different risk tolerance for themselves and their children. Affecting that risk tolerance include how you perceive the likelihood of the event, and the marginal value of a dollar, etc.

I would guess that the data are on your side,my above hyperbole aside. Studies show that people tend to overemphasize very low probability events (i.e. we have a very hard time understanding that something with a .005 percent chance is 100 times less likely than something with a .5 percent chance).

My point is that it would be silly to legislate something that would make us worse off. If we are free to put the kid in a seat now and don't do it, then making us do it would necessarily make us worse off.

You are right. I was making a point with hyperbole. As you can see from the rest of my post, I absolutely am against legislating this, and I acknowledge that most parent don't put their kids in car seats and most parents are not crazy. :p

I am guessing that number would be very large. If we assume this is a low probability event, which you and I think it is, it would take a lot of tickets before you actually prevented an injury--making the cost per injury prevented very high. This is the same reason that we don't, as consumer, pay for safer adult seatbelts on planes.

No, not crazy; simply cheap and don't know better.

Check with your next FA - they will all tell you it is frequent - which is why their union is pushing for it

No kidding. Why do you think it is crazy for your child to fly in a plane without being restrained? Do you think it's crazy to let your child sleep in a bedroom without an automatic fire sprinkler system?