The recent incident on the Alaskan Airlines plane in which the cover for an unused escape exit hatch blew off the plane, causing instant depressurization and suction so strong that it sucked the shirt off of the young man seated in the middle seat in that row (fortunately the window seat was unoccupied), illustrates that it is simply not safe to have lap infants/children on flights.
The US decided long ago that infants and children must ride buckled into car seats. Sure, there’s a cost in terms of money (buying seats) and time (installing and then buckling kids into and taking them out of seats), but weighed against children’s lives, it’s worth it.
If there had been lap infants/toddlers anywhere near that blown out panel, they surely would have been sucked right out of the plane. Lap infants have already been injured in turbulence events. Do we have to wait until one is actually sucked out of a plane? Yes, there is a cost in people being forced to buy a seat for their under 2 yr old child, but flying is still considered a privilege that people pay for, not a human right. It’s just one more cost that people have to shoulder, when having children.
I flew with our D when she was 6 months in a baby sling contraption. It was miserable for me. After that she had her own seat strapped into her car seat. Safer and better for me too.
Yeah, I had a very snug chest carrier that I used during flights, figuring that the baby was so tightly secured in it, that they wouldn’t fly up during turbulence and hit the ceiling. My lap belt was tightly around my hips, below the carrier. We would fight to keep that car seat with us right until we knew that there was absolutely no other empty seat on the plane that we could use for the car seat, and gate check it if it was not possible to use it. And still, I knew that it was dangerous and risky. But our money was limited at that stage in life, so we took the risk.
I never considered that a window panel might pop off, and suck the baby right out of the plane. What a disaster. Makes me never want to take the window seat, or exit row, again!
Good question. My mistake. Maybe it should go into parent cafe? Of course, it would require that the FAA change regulations, and I guess that it is political, since it’s a government agency.
They were lucky it was only at 16,000 ft. I knew a family year ago who were flying on a plane where a window failed. The person in the window seat was sucked completely out, flung into space, crushing their shoulder girdle and pelvis. The person in the middle seat made it halfway out, lodging at their pelvis. They were over the ocean and had to continue with a dead person stuck in the window until they could land.
Agreed. We never did it. Even when we had infants and the cost of plane fare was a huge deal, if we couldn’t afford a seat for the infant we couldn’t afford the trip and didn’t go. We always brought the car seat and put it in its own seat facing backward. Was a massive pain, but it never made sense to not have a safe, secure seat, nor would it have been fair to the stranger in the third seat.
BTW, interesting side note. The sudden depressurization of the main cabin created enough pressure differential to instantly and violently slam the secure cockpit door open. I guess note to future hypothetical hijacker – find a way to cause depressurization and take advantage of the chaos and unsecure cockpit…
To cause such sudden depressurization, one needs to rip a large chunk of the fuselage out or open a door; a small hole wouldn’t do. The chances of someone getting out of their seat and making it to the cockpit and hijacking the plane after such depressurization are not that great. Sure, theoretically it is possible, but practically - not so much.
We live in Portland and a boy in my son’s class was on the plane Friday. Poor kid missed an athletic recruiting weekend because he absolutely wouldn’t get on another plane. Don’t blame him a bit.
Lap babies are a pain but I’m not sure we need to outlaw it. There were a handful of small babies on the plane.
That didn’t happen in this case. The flight crew in front were not sucked away and were able to repeatedly work on trying to get the door closed again (eventually succeeding after several tries).
It’s not that lap babies are a pain - it’s that it’s not safe for the lap babies. We didn’t mandate car seats for infants to protect the other people in the car from airborne babies!
Thank God no one died! I’m surprised that the FAA didn’t ground ALL of the 737 Max airplanes until they figured out what the heck is going on with that plane. This plane seems to be on the news a lot, and not in a good way. ROAD TRIP!
I used to be a flight attendant back in the day, and I took my kids on many flights as babies. Not that I am any kind of expert, but I had a tiny bit of insider knowledge, haha. Car seats are great, but they are very bulky and they only work for the smallest of children. Young kids who are too big for car seats are not going to be helped by this measure, though of course, it’s the safest way for very small children to travel.
This event was extremely rare. I can think of a few very prominent similar incidents, out of literally hundreds of millions of flights. These incidents are much more rare than they used to be in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s really lucky that no small kids were near the false door that blew out.
Playing devil’s advocate…
In an ideal world, yes, all tiny kids would be in car seats, but that could cause other problems. It is very difficult to evacuate a plane with car seats in the mix, even if they are placed at the window. Things go flying in plane crashes, when hitting air pockets, etc… Seat belts can and do fail, seat cushions can come off. Plane evacuations are much more common than the type of incident Alaska Airlines experienced. So it’s very possible that in trying to solve one problem, more problems will arise for larger numbers of people.
I’m not trying to be callous. I think airlines have always struggled with how to accommodate the largest number of people in the safest possible way. And, more cynically, in the most cost effective way.
Re using this as a possible means of hijacking, I think it’s unlikely because the risk of hijackers causing harm to themselves is too great.
