Wouldn’t it also be a liability issue? If it was used improperly or failed and a kid got hurt, it could mean a lawsuit.
Seems like it would be the same as if a regular seat belt failed and an adult got hurt. That’s why aircraft equipment requires such extensive and expensive testing and the crew has to be trained on its proper use.
And adult seatbelts are much simpler devices because they don’t need to securely restrain somebody who might try to get out of them, the way that kid safety harnesses do.
Wouldn’t it be a liability if you reserved one & one wasn’t available & then something happened to you kid?
Is it common for people to show up to the airport and book a flight day of? If not, that would seem to go a long way to resolving the logistical challenge, such as it may be, of ensuring adequate harnesses are on hand for any given flight.
Also, seriously… what if s kid spills something on a harness? IDK, what if a kid spills something on their sestbelt?
I remember when I first heard about this situation and I envisioned the beating I’d have gotten from my father if I had so much as attempted to revolt by refusing to be belted on a plane. Times have changed.
For the better, right?
When I hear about situations like this, I really do wonder.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that beating a child that is afraid to fly until they stop resisting is sub-optimal compared to inconveniencing 146 passengers.
They sure have! Much less domestic violence, AND much less child misbehavior. Tabloids always find the outrage, but the trends show that things are getting better.
Hitting kids makes them more aggressive.
It’s a shitty thing to do and it’s also terribly ineffective.
For the record you’re talking about hitting a 13 to 36 month old child. Toddlerhood maxes out at about three years old.
And since when did hitting a frightened child calm them? Taking the kid off the plane was the right thing to do. It was a better thing to do than harnessing them, too.
Yes. Usually it happens when something went wrong and they need to rebook. But people book flights day-of all the time. Often it’s the same route on the same airline, but I have both re-booked on a different airline and also rebooked a different route (changing planes in a different city.) And less often it happens out-of-the-blue because someone suddenly realizes they want to get to a funeral or something.
It’s not that I think this is impossible. It’s that I think you are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. I think the marginal danger to kids of not having ideal seatbelts is very very small. I suspect you’d do a lot more good by implementing shoulder belts for adults. (And the marginal value of that is pretty small, too.) The types of accidents airplanes get into are different from the types of accidents autos get into, and intuitions based on auto accidents don’t really apply.
I could change an attitude with a private walk. Of course you cannot do that taxi-ing down a runway.
Like I said preparedness is key. Teach the child to act right at home and you can expect them to carry that out every where else, barring unforeseen circumstances (illness, pain, overtired)
If this child is neuro-typical there’s got to be a way to reason. Even the terrible 2yo can be bribed. (You will never reason with a 2yo.)
I honestly think this logic is equivalent to the logic used by vaccine skeptics to justify a delayed vaccine cycle for children. “It just seems wrong to inject a little baby with so many shots all at once. The marginal danger of spreading those shots out over a couple more years is very very small.”
No, the cost of spreading out shots is far higher than the cost of grouping them. The largest cost to spacing out shots is that it reduces the odds the kid will get all the shots. And the actual risk to grouping them is approximately zero. Shots are grouped mostly because it’s cheaper that way, and only secondarily to get them into the kids sooner.
I think you are closer to using vaccine sceptic logic – jumping through complicated hoops to avoid an imagined risk that really isn’t there.
Do you know that adults, also, routinely take off their seat belts when they aren’t supposed to? Usually it’s because they really really need to pee, but I’ve seen people do it just to mess with their luggage.
I feel like we’re rapidly approaching “Show me a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of parachutes when jumping out of an airplane” territory.
And yes, I am aware of this very much tongue-in-cheek study on the matter:
Prove to me that a harness that is designed to restrain children is safer than a single lap belt that obviously isn’t!
You might want to lobby for lap and shoulder belts on subways, city buses, and trains while you are at it.
I hope you’re not viewing that nostalgically.
The thing is, the planes require seatbelts. Any arguments about the statistically low need for harnesses would equally apply to requiring the seatbelts at all. Things just don’t go wrong often enough for them to be a problem.
I know the logic for busses is that they are big enough that their mass prevents the sorts of injuries you’d see in a smaller vehicle, and thus passive protection is sufficient. School busses I always noticed had very padded seats, front and back, and only the driver really is in enough danger to wear a seat belt.
My guess for trains and subways is that the track makes it less likely anything is going to go wrong as well.
As for the harnesses: it sounds like people do like having them for their kids–to the point some will bring their own carseats, and a cheaper harness is being made for easy travel. If those exist, then I don’t really see why an airline wouldn’t get in on it somehow so they get the money people pay for those things instead of places that sell them.
Whether it makes an appreciable difference to safety, I don’t know. But these are airlines. They change the price of things based on how much they think you’re willing to pay. Making money is their priority.