TSA reviews lapchild guidelines

Awhile back I wrote about the debate over lap children.

Current government regulation says children under age 2 are the only people who can fly without being buckled up. Babies can fly for free by sitting on an adult's lap.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has long recommended buying a seat and securing a child in a car seat or a CARES harness. But on December 9 the National Transportation Safety Board wants to visit this issue, and ask the question, Should children under 2 be required to sit in a car seat while flying?

The NY Times reports:

The independent federal agency, which investigates transportation accidents and promotes safety, has long pushed for a rule requiring that all passengers be properly restrained in a separate seat, including children under 2 years old. The latest recommendation was sent to the Federal Aviation Administration in August, citing various crashes over the years in which children who were seated in car seats were protected and others in which children seated in a parent’s lap were injured or killed.

No one disputes that children would be safer aboard passenger jets when strapped in a car seat instead of being held in a parent’s lap. “Every single thing on that airplane down to the coffee pots are required to be properly restrained except children under the age of 2,” said Patricia Friend, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “It’s just physically impossible, no matter how much a parent loves that child, given deceleration forces of an aircraft in a crash to hold onto that child.”

The Federal Aviation Administration agrees with the safety board that a child is safer when belted into a child restraint system, or CRS, and states on its Web site that “keeping a child in a CRS or device during the flight is the smart and right thing to do.”

But the F.A.A. continues to turn down the child seat request. The rationale? It maintains that doing so would require families — now accustomed to children under 2 years old flying free if they sit in a parent’s lap — to pay for the extra seat. That cost, the F.A.A. surmises, would cause some families to revert to car travel, which is less safe. “Consequently,” states the agency in its latest response to the safety board, “entire families would be subject to far higher fatality rates, which would produce a net increase in overall transportation fatalities.”

Not surprisingly, safety seat advocates dismiss this argument as beside the point. Requiring every passenger to be appropriately belted in is “a simple matter of equal protection,” said Stephanie M. Tombrello, executive director of SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., a nonprofit group that focuses on child passenger safety. Ms. Tombrello pointed out that pilots regularly instruct passengers to stay buckled in their seats when not up to use the restroom.

“We just don’t see it as an either/or situation,” said Ms. Friend of the Association of Flight Attendants.

Photo: Flickr/Lars Plougman