The Boeing 737 Max Crisis Reignites Arguments Over Infant Safety on Planes

As terrible as that tradeoff is, its worth noting that the risk of death on a commercial airliner to anyone, lap-held infants included, remains vanishingly lowso let the pangs of guilt subside if youve flown holding your baby on your lap..

Commercial aircraft accidents are still extremely rare, and the logistics of having infants in specific seats, with the installation of a CRS for every flight, may outweigh the safety aspects, notes Sarah Barry, deputy head of the School of Aviation and Security at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK...

The following year, the NTSB added seats for infants to the FAAs list of most wanted safety improvements, but the request was removed in 2006 after the FAAs own modeling showed that buying that extra ticket would motivate 20 percent of families to drive rather than flyin particular, those with the tightest budgetsand in turn lead to an increase in road deaths...

That belief was backed up by academic research in 2002 that showed the policy change would cause a small net increase in deaths, even if as few as 5 percent of families opted to hit the road instead..

However, research from the University of Reading in the UK last year showed that flights were getting bumpier due to climate change, with severe turbulence across the North Atlantic increasing by 55 percent since 1979..

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