The Boeing 737 Max Crisis Reignites Arguments Over Infant Safety on Planes

As Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 neared 16,000 feet, a boom thundered through the plane as a chunk of the plane’s bodywork was ripped away. In the US, the Federal Aviation Authority doesn’t require infants under the age of two to have their own seat, allowing them to be held on a parent’s lap without a belt. Aviation authorities in Canada and Japan follow the FAA’s lead, but the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority take a different approach, requiring lap-held infants to be secured with an additional seatbelt that loops around their belly and links to the parent during takeoff and landing. “The safest place for a child under age two is an approved child-restraint system or device, not an adult’s lap,” a spokesperson for the FAA, Mina Kaji, said in an email. The costs of mandating that under-twos be placed in child restraint systems —industry lingo for an approved car seat that can be added to a regular seat—aren’t just financials, but also, somewhat unexpectedly, road deaths: The FAA’s own modeling and academic research suggest that, in the US at least, requiring families to buy a ticket for infants two and under would push some to drive instead of flying, leading to an estimated increase in total transportation deaths by 72 over a decade.