I am surprised too. My H was on a flight today on a MAX 9 plane (another airline) and the flight was cancelled because this airline is taking these planes out of commission to inspect them all. There have been plenty of issues with the various iterations of the MAX, so that seems prudent in this case.
Separately Boeing is asking the FAA for a safety exemption on the MAX planes: Boeing still hasn't fixed this problem on Max jets, so it's asking for an exemption to safety rules | AP News
The most prudent decision I can make right nowā¦ROAD TRIP! I love the scenery. 
Death rate per mile is far higher in cars than on scheduled airline flights.
Iām just looking for an excuse for a road trip.
Thereās a famous Freakonomics paper showing that itās not worth it (and in addition, car seat mandates discourage parents from having more children):
In this case the unintended consequences would be even worse, because if they canāt afford to fly, then more people will travel by car and be much more likely to die than on a plane. No one has died traveling as a passenger on a US airline in more than a decade.
Not true. A passenger died on the ill-fated Southwest flight when the engine blew up - that happened less than 10 years ago. And it was the situation where a lap infant could have been seriously hurt or killed.
Thatās hilarious. When I was still in high school (so 40+ years ago) I asked my mom why people didnāt have big families anymore (my dadās side of the family is Catholic, but my m/d only had two of us) and she flippantly declared ācar seatsā. Iāll have to tell her that now there is research to back up her own conclusion.
Yes and more precisely, the research shows it specifically discourages parents from having a third child since three car seats wonāt fit in most back seats
Note that a lot of what is cited by Freakonomics is about kids 2 and over who would be required to buy a seat on an airplane. The whole point of this thread is about lap infants under 2.
The FAA doesnāt have to change the rule to require infants purchase a ticket - any airline could do that (what the airlines canāt do is allow those over 2 to be lap passengers). And the under 2 rule is rather arbitrary. My daughter weighed 18 pounds at age 2 but some babies weight 25 pounds at 3 months (2 of my brothers did). Why should a 25 pound 3 month old not need a seat but a 25 pound 3 year old does?
A lot of theaters and stadiums require everyone to have a ticket. Not for safety but because it isnāt fair for the neighboring seat purchases to have to share space with non-payers. Airlines could enforce the same rules. They could provide extra seatbelts that secure smaller travelers better so that all didnāt have to have carseats.
This is definitely a consideration, that the presence of a lap infant, especially when that āinfantā is a big squirming 23 month old, impinges on the neighborās space, including that the person in front of the lap child cannot recline their seat. But the main consideration is the safety of the infant, who cannot be secured during turbulence.
We just flew yesterday and the woman in the aisle next to us had a very large lap baby. Maybe 1 1/2 years old but was pulling on the seat in front of him the entire time and infringing on the space of the person in the middle seat next to them. She had to feed him at one point and the babyās head was in lap of the guy in the middle.
Iām not sure it matters that much. When the seat belt light goes out in many cases the babies are going to be in momās or dadās arms even if they have their own seat.
Right.
Hereās the issue:
When the seatbelt sign is off, many people unbuckle, move around, etcā¦ Itās very likely that baby will be taken out of the car seat as soon as possible. An air pocket or explosive decompression may not happen when people are in their seats with their belts on. Of course, thatās why you almost always hear the pilot say that you should keep your belt fastened whenever youāre in your seat.
I hit a major air pocket once. Let me tell you, it was surreal and scary. I literally was suspended in mid-air for a split second and was able to grab a seat back before I hit the ceiling. I came down in someoneās lap, which was pretty funny at the time, but only because all ended well. Luckily, only the FAās were up and about because we were going to land shortly. A number of items did go flying, but nothing major.
Again, I donāt mean to sound callous, but I canāt see a true benefit in requiring car seats for all infants, unless airlines also mandate that babies remain in the car seat with straps secured for the duration of the flight.
Would it be possible to design a seat belt setup that confined a toddler in his seat without a car seat? Wouldnāt work for infants who need much more support, but perhaps airlines could supply a seat more suited to airplane use than your standard car seat.
IMO, they should mandate that all passengers stay in their seats with seatbelts on for the whole flight with limited exceptions to use the bathroom.
My dad worked for the airlines and we grew up flying all the time. My parents insisted we always had our seatbelts on and we still do it today. When D was a baby, we kept her in the carseat as well.
And when everyone else is wearing the seatbelt, the infant can be strapped in using a seatbelt extender. Although US airlines donāt provide them, they are compulsory on many foreign airlines. We used them frequently flying long haul and they work well during take-off/landing/turbulence:
Itās narrowly hypothesizing that households who already have two kids who are both young enough to still require carseats after a new baby would be born and who are on the margin of wanting and being able to afford the extra costs associated with supporting three kids are less likely to have a third kid in that time frame due to the hassle and possible costs of upgrading to a larger vehicle.
Should we care about that? Itās not obvious to me that we should, but perhaps there have been other studies that show the downsides of that margin not being incentivized to have more kids.
We didnāt fly much when our kids were infants but when we did we always purchased seats and used car seats until around the age of 2. One of the reasons was they did much better in their car seats because they never expected to get out of them (since they were never out of them in the car). This was particularly true of our son, who was very active. The idea that he wouldāve stayed on our laps during a flight was never in the cards.
I agree with this in principal and thatās our standard practice in our family now. But when we were flying with very young kids (who we paid for seats for and brought car seats), we definitely had bouts of walking the kids in our arms up and down the aisle, bouncing them to keep them from balling their eyes out for hours on end. I suspect we would have made a lot of enemies if we had left them in their car seats to cry as loudly as possible for hours. And I can guarantee you short of drugging the kids (not recommended by pediatrician), there is absolutely nothing else that would have caused them to cry it out and fall asleep or go quiet.