When Cait Williams, a Brooklyn mom, was planning a work trip to Los Angeles in March, she decided to bring along her husband and their daughter, Zuri, who was then 15 months old. Williams, who is 36 and a philanthropy officer for a nonprofit, said she had the luxury of her employer covering her airfare, and was able to opt for a third seat. Zuri spent most of the flight on the lap of either parent, and the middle seat allowed for some more elbow room and a spot for toys and extra diapers.
But given recent high-profile incidents of severe turbulence, Williams said she was rethinking her family’s strategy. Until Zuri turns 2, Williams told me, “I don’t know that I would fly sans car seat again.”
As they look ahead to summer air travel, parents flying with young children told me that they mostly think about surviving the flight, metaphorically speaking: Does a delay merit some screen time? Did we pack enough cut-up kiwi? But for some, like Williams, the small handful of shaky flights in the news lately have prompted reflection on how to keep babies and toddlers safe in the air.
As far as U.S. guidelines go, the Federal Aviation Administration says the safest way for children under 2 to fly is in their own plane seat while secured in an FAA-certified “child-restraint system,” such as most car seats. (Children 2 and older must have their own plane seat.)
Injuries due to turbulence are rare. From 2009 to 2022, 163 people (34 passengers and 129 crew members) sustained serious injuries related to turbulence. Still, when it comes to kids on laps, the FAA cites a 2019 study by the National Institutes of Health that found “unrestrained lap children are prone to in-flight injuries, particularly during meal service or turbulence.” Not only that, but during severe turbulence, “These babies or children could become projectiles,” potentially also injuring other passengers, Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, professor of aviation at University of North Dakota, told me.
Not great. Even so, the FAA has long permitted children under 2 years old to fly on the lap of a parent or accompanying adult, which is free on most airlines. Why? Because it doesn’t want parents to drive instead.
“The FAA has not mandated seats for children under age 2 based on studies that concluded the cost of paying for these seats would prompt some families to travel by road, which is a less safe mode of transportation,” the regulator wrote in a statement.
Risk-benefit frameworks like this are commonplace for agencies that regulate public health and safety, Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, an advocacy group, told me. Still, there’s something a bit unsettling about the shadowy arithmetic at work in deriving child-safety guidance this way — perhaps all the more so given that the statistical analyses were likely run on numbers gathered when some of today’s parents were themselves toddlers.
The FAA rule allowing kids under 2 to fly on laps appears to date back to 1992 and was controversial then. In an October 1992 news story, the Washington Postnoted that the policy went “against the recommendations of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Association of Flight Attendants, the airline industry, and several members of Congress who say that allowing babies to be held on laps can be deadly in strong turbulence or crashes.”
“Everything in the plane must be secured,” David Melanson, a spokesman for the flight attendants, told the Post at the time. “Why not babies?”
The FAA presented its rationale in a 1995 report to Congress, in which it analyzed the impact of its new rule. “Air travelers who divert to other modes of transportation” — like driving — “will be subject to the higher mortality and injury rates associated with those modes,” the report notes. It also argues that the rule makes financial sense for airlines, which might lose business if they did away with a lap-child exception. In that case, “Increased costs and/or revenue loss may affect the profits of air carriers.”
Later, after the shock of 9/11 led to far fewer people flying in the U.S. in the attacks’ immediate aftermath, researchers found significant increases in road deaths, which seemed to validate the FAA’s stance.
The FAA told me that this remains its position today. A spokesman added that, historically, the agency had a dual mandate to both ensure safety and promote aviation; Congress has since removed the promotional focus from the FAA’s duties and instructed it to consider only safety. “While our 1995 Report to Congress does mention financial considerations for airlines in addition to safety, our position on the issue today is strictly based on safety,” he wrote in an email.
I asked Jesse Sparks, lead meteorologist with the Aviation Weather Center at the National Weather Service, whether turbulence is worse now than it used to be, back when the FAA rule went into effect. He said, in a word, no.
“An overall increase in air-traffic volume, better reporting and remote sensing of turbulence, and more widely-available media accounts of turbulence incidents creates the perception that the frequency of turbulence has increased,” he wrote in an email. “But in reality, turbulence in the atmosphere is not increasing with time.”
But even if the air isn’t any rougher, cars, planes, and factors affecting family spending have certainly changed since the ’90s. Could it be time to run the numbers again?
Some flight attendants think so. In March, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union submitted a list of priorities to Congress that included banning the “lap child” exception and mandating that each passenger occupy their own seat with a restraint.
For some parents of young kids, though, this would feel like overkill. When Summer Zalesky and her husband travel from their home in Montana to see family in Arizona or California, her 2-and-a-half-year-old needs her own seat. But Zalesky, 28, straps their 5-month-old to her chest in a carrier — sometimes taking her out to hold her, at flight attendants’ request, during takeoff and landing.
On a flight to Paris last year, Zalesky’s elder child, who was then 16 months old, fell asleep stretched between her father’s lap and an empty seat. Zalesky was understandably thrilled that her daughter had dozed off on the overnight flight. “I know this probably sounds bad, but I didn’t think about, Well, there could be turbulence, she needs to be strapped in.”
Some parents feel that succumbing to anxiety about in-air safety can be harmful in itself. When Leah Pascarella, a marketing and entrepreneurship consultant in Manhattan, and her husband have traveled with their toddler on a short flight, one of them has typically held him on their lap or strapped him to their chest, she told me. For a flight longer than two hours, they would often purchase a third seat and secure him in a car seat. Now that their child is 2, and the couple is expecting another, they plan to use the same rule of thumb — flight duration — to determine whether to purchase a seat for their infant.
On a shorter flight, “I don’t have qualms about the baby being on me, so long as it’s secured safely,” Pascarella, 32, said. “We live in Manhattan. Why am I going to freak myself out about something that is statistically so much less likely to happen than what the average kid is exposed to multiple times on a daily basis?” She went on: “It felt like that actually could be a net negative to our family’s mental health — to overcompensate and make sure that he was in a car seat every single time” just because of a couple news stories.
But parents also want answers as to why, at least on domestic flights, the established safety benefits of securing a child in their own seat come at such a premium.
“If that’s their formal recommendation for the safest option, will they be subsidizing tickets for children?” Williams, the Brooklyn mom, asked of airlines. “A lot of families can’t afford an extra ticket.”
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