Look around next time you’re on an airplane. Chances are you’ll spot a baby or two squirming on an adult’s lap throughout the flight. That includes takeoff and landing and times of turbulence when everything from overhead luggage to coffee pots must be secured.
These unsecured passengers are called lap babies, and they’re once again in the news. The National Transportation Safety Board is continuing its campaign to end the long-standing practice of allowing kids under age 2 to fly for free as long as they sit on a parent’s lap.
The NTSB wants those lap babies safely restrained in automobile-style child safety seats during flights. The practical effect of that requirement means parents would have to buy plane tickets for their babies so the youngsters could have their own seats. The NTSB has included this item on its wish list since 1995. It points to the absurdity that babies are required to be restrained in safety seats in cars while traveling to and from airports, but those same car seats often end up as checked baggage on flights while the children themselves travel unsecured.
The NTSB last month called the Federal Aviation Administration’s failure to require safety seats “unacceptable” and urged the FAA to act quickly. That’s unlikely. The FAA continues to resist mandating infant safety seats aloft because it believes the cost outweighs the benefit, given how few kids under 2 have died in air incidents that some passengers survived. (That excludes air disasters like those of Sept. 11, 2001, in which no one survived–and in which safety seats couldn’t possibly have offered protection.)
The FAA also argues that forcing parents to buy plane tickets for their infants–even at the 50 percent discount many airlines offer–means more families would opt to drive rather than fly. The danger of death and injury on the nation’s highways is statistically far greater than it is in the air. The number of highway deaths dropped last year, but that still meant 42,643 people died–and 494 of them were under age 4.
By comparison, in the last five years not a single lap baby died in a survivable air crash.
The NTSB staff this month attempted to refute that argument by analyzing highway deaths during three periods when the number of air passengers dropped–the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 2001 terrorist attacks. The NTSB concluded there’s no close correlation between declines in air travel and “large-scale” increases in road fatalities.
But requiring all of the estimated 4.5 million children under 2 who fly each year to be ticketed based on this limited statistical analysis is a leap of faith–and an expensive one at that.
The FAA is right on this. Overall, the benefits of mandating safety seats don’t outweigh the costs. This doesn’t mean the FAA is cavalier about lap babies, and it doesn’t mean individual parents won’t continue to make their own personal cost-benefit calculations.
Since 1982 the FAA has allowed parents to bring their own government-certified child safety seats on board airplanes. Many parents do so. They either buy tickets for their babies, guaranteeing they will have seats of their own in which to secure the safety seats, or they gamble that there will be empty seats on the flight.
The FAA says it plans to kick off a new campaign in September to further educate parents about safe ways of traveling with young children. It should continue to “strongly recommend” safety seats. The difference between that and mandating them is, for some families, the margin between flying and driving. Statistically, lap babies are safer aloft than their playmates secured in safety seats on the highways.
