Fly first class, and accept the alcohol they offer you.
I know a couple of people who have a prescription from their doctor for (used to be Valium, probably a different drug now) to take while flying.
Me, I’ll just look out the window and enjoy seeing the ground fall away.
But i do think drugging an especially anxious child is a decent option.
Well, I want people to be able to make informed decisions about their travel options. Which, IMHO, was the fundamental sin in the infamous Pinto case: even if I were to grant, for the sake of argument, that the cost-benefit of reducing the risk of fire or explosion from a low-speed rear-end collision was not worth it for that particular car or cars in general, the government should, at bare minimum, have required that such risks be published to people so that consumers can make informed decisions. Because I bet you that if a consumer looks at two comparably priced cars, from different manufacturers but which are functionally identical in every respect except that one is more liable to explode under a rear-end scenario… they’re probably going to go with the other car. They might even pay more for the other car than the auto industry thinks a rational actor should be willing to pay.
What industry experts (and their colluders in the government) often seem to forget is that average monetary cost is only an approximation of cost in a cost-benefit analysis. The real cost and benefit will vary by consumer not only according to their income, but to their individual risk-tolerance and other peculiarities that are no less a part of a rational actor’s calculus than the purely monetary cost. Peace of mind, for instance.
Anyway, if you (or the airlines) like, the disclaimer about how airplane seatbelts are less safe for children and may be easy for them to wriggle out of and cause disruption leading to deplaning can also include a short statement on the relative safety of travelling by plane vs. by car.
I’m curious if anyone has collected statistics of people injured on commercial air flights, by age, sex, type of injury, cause of injury, etc.
There’s pretty good data for automobiles. (Although the best auto data is for deaths, and the next best data is for $cost.) Airline deaths are pretty well analyzed, too, whether or not that data is published in an easy-to-get-at way. But i don’t know if anyone collects data on non-fatal injuries on commercial flights. That’s the data i think you want. Things like people who get hurt when they bounce against the ceiling during severe turbulence.
Once, in very-far-from-first class, I opened up my bottle of duty-free Scotch, which my new best friend in the seat next to mine and I proceeded to quaff.
Did you pass the bottle back and forth to take sips or did you pour out shots in a plastic airline cup?
Pass it over here!
Duct tape?
Harness, schmarness!!
Really tho’.
I had a traq’ed cat in an airline approved carrier that escaped in a cabin one-time. Now, that was fun.
Everyone on the plane was very happy to pet the drunken cat as he sloppily strolled by, drooling alittle.
(I’ve seen YouTubes of duct taped adults, not really proposing that, just being facetious)
Actually, I remember being told – I think the first time we tried traveling with a child – that Benadryl (well-known to make kids sleepy) was a totally legit resort if necessary, BUT that if one thought one might go that route, to try it out beforehand just to make sure one didn’t have the sort of kid who got hyped up on Benadryl instead of sleepy.
(We never did either the testing or bringing Benadryl along, although I think later the kids had Benadryl for actual medicinal use and it does in fact make them sleepy.)
Try any tranquilizer out on your cat at home, first, too. We did that before flying my mother’s cats from Florida to NYState. One cat went to sleep The other staggered around the house in an agitated state, clearly upset that her body wasn’t working right.
I’m guessing that this is a lot of it. A toddler well past their bedtime might be a terrible mess.
My grandkids have flown several times internationally as toddlers, with never a problem, but their parents are careful about timing and their pre-flight sleep schedules.
As for car seats, they take them all the time for flights. A pain to get through the airport, true, but the upside is you have them ready for the car on the other end.
Directly quote the posts saying this and all the other chargers you have made.
Aaron acted this way, and got invited to birthday parties?!?!?
The Jonesboro school shooting, in the late 1990s, were committed by two pre-teen boys. One of them was the type that, even in kindergarten, if a classmate was having a party, the other parents would call the host family and ask if Andrew was invited. Even if he was, they would not allow their kids to go even if he wasn’t going to be there, because they didn’t want their kids around a family that would see no problem with including him.
There was also a boy at a church in my old town whose parents were told that he couldn’t be in the 5-year-olds’ Sunday School class because he was constantly pinching other children, and thought this was very funny and nothing could distract him. This broke the teachers’ hearts because they knew the parents were doing their best, and I found out later that he was discovered to have a rare metabolic disorder that produced autism-like symptoms. (His mother picked the music for the contemporary service, and I would think of an old Dennis the Menace cartoon where they’re in church, and the cartoon is captioned, “Because I knew ‘Yankee Doodle’ better, that’s why.”)
Thanks. And the other piece of this - yes, an adult is generally stronger than a child, but the issue is that if you restrain too much, you can hurt the child. So yes, I suppose I could have held him down successfully if I’d been willing to break his arm to do it. But it’s not anything like restraining an adult, you have to be forceful without injuring the child and that’s very difficult because you don’t really know what a reasonable amount of force is. Any conscientious parent would err on the side of caution.
I mean there’s your answer right there. Aaron’s parents were enabling his behavior. There’s a difference between enabling a child’s behavior and setting firm limits and reasonable consequences. The question is what do you do when that doesn’t work to change a child’s behavior. When nothing you try seems to work.
The best you can do is try to stop the behavior, mitigate the impact of the behavior as much as possible, apologize, get the kid to apologize, hold him accountable through enforced consequences, and keep trying.
Thank you. You said it better than me.
It would begin with actually knowing what the behaviour is.
If a passenger is known to throw tantrums, doesn’t obey rules, refuses to be restrained, and needs to be removed from a plane, you put them in a catering truck.
Ha! Brilliant way to blend two recent news items.
You win the internet for the day.
Why retrieve the family’s baggage? Delayed baggage was routine back in the day. Give the family a copy of Dr. Greene’s The Explosive Child and a voucher for a pack of diapers as compensation for the inconvenience.
In our post-9/11 world, airlines sometimes won’t allow checked baggage to be on a plane that the owner of said baggage is not on. As mentioned upthread, that was standard policy for some time, but apparently it’s now a discretionary thing.
First, given the time it happened it was probably at least three hours past normal bedtime, that alone could cause meltdown, add in a (potentially new & unfamiliar / scary situation), being told to do something he didn’t want to do I can see the meltdown occurring.
Additionally, given the time of night, it may not have been so simple to go back to the gate & deplane the family. Where there any other flights the ground crew was servicing that night or once this plane left they left for the night, which means (potentially) no ground marshals to help them park, no one to operate the jet bridge &/or no one to operate the tug to push them back again once the family had been deplaned? I don’t know those answers in this case & didn’t see those details in the article.
Airlines providing harnesses is a no-go just from a logistics point. While they may have enough in a hub city, how many are they supposed to keep in a spoke airport? What happens when all of those have left on earlier flights? What happens when a family doesn’t return one, or flies out on Airline A but returns on Airline B which means two airlines have them on one-way flights & not in their original location. What happens when a kid pukes on one or spills their milk on one? Do they clean it locally or return it to it origin station for cleaning; who cleans it & how well? Do they need to send them out (cost involved) or do it in house? If in house, there is ordering & keeping of cleaning supplies, which means storage & more logistics.