The Enshittification Of Air Travel — Part 2
In Part 1 of this blog post I covered many ways in which air travel has become demonstrably more, well, shit, over my quarter century of flying. Part 2 covers a more serious and potentially deadly aspect of flying: infant safety. Or rather, the lack of it and airlines’ obstruction even for parents willing to buy an extra seat.
It’s just after noon and flight EZY8678 from London Gatwick to Amsterdam is preparing to depart. I’m on board with my wife and daughter, aged nearly two, having an argument with the cabin crew manager. Eventually the captain comes down the aisle, pointedly asking if the situation is resolved as he’d quite like to push back from the stand now.
Whether it’s this intervention, the futility of arguing or just the manager’s bad breath I’m not sure, but in any case I relent and we take off, my daughter in the least safe position possible. Thankfully it was an uneventful flight as most are, but in my subsequent research I’m even more sure: easyJet was just plain wrong.
The source of my concern: we had booked a seat for my daughter so that she doesn’t need to sit on an adult’s lap. If you’re wondering why this is unsafe, you probably haven’t seen the loop belt provided, or your child’s head touching the seat in front while “restrained” in such a system.
So ineffective and unsafe is this device that the USA’s regulator, the FAA, has banned its use. Here’s what they have to say about it:
In a suddenly occurring deceleration in the longitudinal aircraft axis, the adult and the infant show a pronounced jack-knife effect. The upper torso and the lower extremities of the infant as well as of the adult sitting behind the infant fold up in a forward direction, with the loop belt restraining the infant. Finally, the loop belt drives into the infant’s abdomen and only stops at his or her vertebral spine. From the technical point of view, the infant acts like an energy absorption element for the adult; the crash loads acting on the adult are thus reduced, and the infant fixed with the loop belt thus suffers most serious up to fatal injuries.
(source: (PDF) FAA Research Order No.: L — 2/97–50 157 / 97, my emphasis)
In effect, the FAA has taken the position that a completely unrestrained child, while obviously unsafe, is still less likely to die than if crushed by an adult. Nevertheless they strongly recommend that all infants have their own seat and suitable restraint/safety device.
Why not ban lap infants altogether? Search online and one possible answer becomes apparent: the FAA has concluded that forcing families to buy an extra seat would push some of them onto the roads, where considerably more fatalities occur. Whether that’s evidence-led holistic thinking or hocus pocus dreamed up by industry lobbyists doesn’t change the fact: it’s really dangerous for an infant to be seated on an adult’s lap.
So, we always try to buy a seat for our daughter and thank goodness she’ll be two soon and hopefully some of this madness will be over.
But why book with easyJet if they insist on such dangerous practices? Because, according to their own website, they don’t:
For take-off, landing and whenever the seat belt signs are on, an infant aged under two years old can be secured in any of the following ways:
- On the parent/guardian’s lap with the use of an extension seat belt.
- In a suitable child car seat (age/weight/height in accordance with manufacturers guidelines).
- In their own seat with a CARES harness (aged 1–4 years approximately and for weight between 10 and 20kg).
(source: Flying with children and infants; emphasis mine).
What the website doesn’t tell you is that cabin crew are largely uninformed about the rules and in practice it’s up to the cabin crew manager’s discretion on the day. We were using the CARES harness mentioned above and purchased specifically for this flight, and were told it can only be used during cruising when the seatbelt sign is off (arguably the safest part of the flight). We were also told that by law children under two must sit on an adult’s lap during take-off and landing. I can find no such law. Showing the easyJet website to crew didn’t help either.
Even mid-flight after he’d already secured a victory against child safety, the manager that day gave me a lecture about how on the lap is the safest place for a baby or small child. The thing is, I did actually stay awake during physics lessons at school, so I never believed him. Here’s another report:
The data and observations from the four tests with the belly belt did not produce any favorable results. The impossibility of protecting a small child, by any means, sitting on the lap of an adult restrained by seat belts was confirmed in these tests. Severe contact with the forward row seat back was observed during double row tests. The recorded head impact of the 6-month old CRABI ATD resulted in a HIC above 1900. Abdominal pressures from the CAMIX ATD were 50% greater than data from booster seats under similar conditions. Aft row occupant impact on the breakover seat back resulted in a definitive peak in the abdominal pressure data. Based on the biomechanical data as well as observations of the films from these tests, the belly belt should not be construed as means of protecting small children.
(source: (PDF) The Performance of Child Restraint Devices in Transport Airplane Passenger Seats, with thanks to the Internet Archive; emphasis mine)
For our return trip we phoned the Special Assistance department who confirmed that the device is allowed and that they would inform ground crew on the day. Of course no message got through, so I had to explain it all over again. On the second round-trip to her manager our cabin crew assistant relented, blaming initially an issue with translation.
So far the only airline we’ve had real success with was Thai Airways. In this case we were allowed to take our daughter (then six months old) in a car seat, although not without a little debate at Heathrow. This mustn’t block any other passenger, so was positioned in the middle of a set of three (with an aisle either side). A window seat should also work, but the extra aisle is also useful for one adult using the loo while the other grabs a few seconds of essential sleep!
It’s so disappointing that while air travel enshitifies even further for adults, equal safety for infants remains a far off prospect. Another example is this crash report from the Canadian authorities in 2012. The only fatality was an infant sitting on the mother’s lap, yet the regulations remain unchanged.
A British airline like easyJet doesn’t have to follow the FAA’s rules of course, but if their website says a safer way of flying is allowed, it is borderline criminal to then deny it during departure. And here perhaps is why the cabin manager, although thoroughly wrong on both safety and airline policy, was so keen to engage with me on the topic: when the request was first denied, I looked at him and said “if there’s an accident, it will be on your conscience”.
A change in the law is long overdue, if not to mandate safer flying for infants then at least to force airlines to allow it. Is anyone at the CAA paying attention?
(Note: credit is due to the author of this post for making it easy to find the above research.)
