I've always flown with one of mine as a lap child, but never had one in my lap. I take the carseats to the gate, and the flight's never full. And trust me, ain't NO one sitting next to 2 or 3 young kids voluntarily. So we always get an extra seat. This works only when you're flying non-peak times, I'm sure.

The one time we flew with our son when he could technically be a lap baby, we bought him a seat. We were flying to Hawaii, so there was absolutely no chance of a free empty seat.

Aside from the safety issue,(of which I agree with Amy 100%) my son was a big kid and there was no way his dad and I could have had him on our lap for over 4 hours.

If you think you can hold on to your child during a crash, or even turbulence, ask yourself this question:

Could I catch my child with nothing but my arms if he was falling from a third-story window?

If you come up with an answer that isn't somewhere between "no" and "fuck no", then you should try this simple experiment.

NOTE: Neither Amy Alkon nor Brian Corbino (me) are responsible for any damage caused to people, places, or things if you do this.

1) Get yourself a bag of sandbox sand from your local hardware store. A 20-40 pound bag will suffice to simulate our baby.

2) Don protective gear (gloves and steel-toed boots at the very least)

3) Have a partner drop the sand bag from an elevated position (6-8 feet will suffice for the experiment).

Try to catch the sandbag without damaging it, or yourself.

If the sandbag breaks, congratulations, your child has died from internal injuries.

A fall from 6 feet for a 20 pound bag is nowhere near the force expressed by a sudden deceleration from flight.

Just as in a car, holding your baby in your lap on a plane is a great idea if you are absolutely certain nothing bad will happen.

The sad angle to this story is the whole idea that the parents who will insist of keeping their child on their laps are the same parents who will treat their children as precious jewels. I can only hope that the information will reach them so that they can change their attitude toward air transport.

http://www.fearlessflight.com/airplane-disasters-plane-crash-statistics

Your chances of being involved in an aircraft accident are about 1 in 11 million. On the other hand, your chances of being killed in an automobile accident are 1 in 5000. Statistically, you are at far greater risk driving to the airport than getting on an airplane

Holding a baby in your lap probably raises the baby's chance of injury/death by 10x (my estimate) IF you are in a survivable airplane accident.

If you save $150 from not buying the extra seat, and apply it to home-safety updates, the safety of the baby goes up in this tradeoff. Putting the money toward new car tires would probably be an improvement in safety.

There are occasional reports about how badly children's car seats are attached by the parents, making them 1/10th as effective (my estimate) as they should be in a crash. People should save money/worry about truly rare events and apply more attention to common, avoidable risks.

I remember reading that an experiment was done with sudden stops with people holding an object the size of their child, and even at 5 mph, nobody was able to hold onto it.

I have a scar on my forehead from when I was around 2 years old from my dad making a sudden stop and me flying into the dashboard.

Andrew makes a good point, people are horrible at evaluating certain types of risk.

The real world trade-off is more likely to be: "We'll have to drive because we can't afford the extra seat or seats."

Most people are horrible at evaluating anything that involves numbers. It's no coincidence our health insurance plans are messed up. We're paying for a mix of insurance against statistically unlikely but potentially ruinous events and things that are certain to occur like office visits.

Extended Warranties and lottery tickets sell quite well. Politicians push gun control while ignoring swimming pools. People freak about the latest health scare while they continue to smoke and eat to excess. They insist something be done about AIDS while doing much less about diseases that kill more people.

All of this will change when we get better schools.

Mark -

I suspect the reason for that is that humans are still, at their base, ruled by their emotions.

It's so much easier to convince someone that guns are lethal than it is to convince them to pay attention to their child in the bath tub.

People also tend to rate the thing with the worse potential outcome as more deserving of attention. Most people don't even consider the possibility of drowning in the bath, but if the baby were to play with a gun and have it go off, well...

None of which stops them bathing the baby nightly while keeping the pistol locked safely away in the cabinet in the basement.

Amy - Thanks.

I think if everyone took a physics course in High School that everything said would be intuitively obvious.

Conservation of momentum is so basic that we're hard wired to deal with it, but like so many other things, we're just lousy estimators.

Until we see it with our own eyes and feel it with our own hands.

We had a flight attendant tell us that we couldn't use our child seat that we'd carried aboard because it didn't have an "FAA-Approved" sticker on it. Never mind that it was the top-rated baby carseat at the time...

... seconds and thirds the idea that you should NEVER fly with your kid on your lap:

NEVER?

As Mark said above, all choices are with respect to the available alternatives.

If the alternative is driving -- which could well be the case for someone of limited means and a couple kids -- then lap carry is the safest option.

The real world trade-off is more likely to be: "We'll have to drive because we can't afford the extra seat or seats."

It's very likely to be that, in fact. Which is why, in an era in which kids have to ride in booster seats until they're almost old enough to drive themselves and playgrounds are covered in padding, you can still fly around the world holding your kid on your lap. Because motor vehicle accidents are still the #1 reason with a bullet that people end up in trauma centers.

This is not to say that I think holding your kid in your lap on a plane is a good idea. It's not. But your risk of being in a plane accident is a tiny fraction of your risk of being in a car accident. An unstrapped child on board the flight that went into the Hudson would probably, on balance, be much better off than a child in a sedan that crashed into an 18-wheeler.

Know why the airlines haven't pushed hard to get the rules tightened up on this? Because they know that a whole hell of a lot of current passengers won't buy extra seats for their kids - they'll drive instead. There goes yet more airline revenue down the drain.

Yes, I'm not proposing any solutions here. I'm not sure there are any in terms of policy. I do think, though, this is a case where the law of unintended consequences is waiting to pounce if too many people decide that Something Must Be Done.

I seem to remember hearing that in military planes, passenger seats faced backwards. I don't know if it is true but it seems to me that would be safer, especially for lap children.

One of these days, aircraft aren't going to have side windows for passengers to look out of, they'll have thin screens fed by cameras, and people wouldn't care if they were facing forward.

I remember riding on a C-5 with rearward facing passenger seats once. The C-117, C-130 and P-3 were lacking in amenities - mostly side facing canvas sling type seats, IIRC.

The P-3 flight was interesting. We had to wear a parachute (regulations) but the water we were flying over was about 40 degrees. If we had to jump or ditch, we'd have been popsicles long before any possible rescue.

Marion - I could imagine something like that happening. However my hope would be that we'd become better at judging risks. As Andrew explained - if safety is a concern, the money could be better spent elsewhere. Flying is already a safe activity. Flying looking forwards with windows on planes is already a safe activity. Flying with children on your lap is also a safe activity.

Now make sure you wear your seatbelt in the taxi to the airport, and make sure your baby is secure in her child seat while you ride the taxi. Use the saved money for her college fund or for good medical insurance.

I flew atleast 5 times with a lap child (under age 2). Each time I had her in a Maya Wrap sling and felt totally secure about our safety. That specific type of sling was: a) attached to me and I still had my arms free and b) designed in such a way that it would act as a net and catch her in the case of a collision that didn't have us all bursting into flames anyway.

I wouldn't recommend it to the average population (false trust, lawsuits, etc). But for the parent that cares to understand the setup, it's effective.

I actually felt more safe then than now in which she has her own seat (age 3). If the plane were to go down, that seatbelt would rip her insides up. I've thought about bringing her carseat along instead, but I'm still not sure about how much more helpful it would be if it locked up or significantly slowed our exit from the plane.

Basically, my decision was made not so much because of money, but more about weighing the risk of an accident compared to the comfort level of the trip. As it is, if I have another kid, I'd fly again as a lap child with a sling.

how are supposed to hold the kid and mix your bloody mary?