Morganthe
New member
An excerpt from the NYT Blog follows. Please click on the NYT link to view the full text.
(reader comments on website)
December 19, 2007, 5:43 pm
The Safety Hazard on Your Lap
By Betsy Wade
[Correction Appended]
As to reckless aspects of air travel, I put the situation of the lap babies at the top. And at this time of year, don’t ask how many there are.
Lap babies are children under the age of 2 who travel free with adults on planes, but without tickets, with no seats of their own, without identification in the airline files or indeed any safety protection whatsoever. These infants and toddlers are the only passengers or crew members who are exempted from being latched into safety belts on takeoff and landing. They sit in parents’ laps and those parental arms are all that keeps them from hurtling through the air in turbulence or a crash landing.
A United Airlines plane that crashed in Sioux City after mechanical failure on July 19, 1989, was carrying a large number of children and lap babies. With a lot of luck and heroic work, 174 passengers of the 285 survived, and all but one of the 11 crew members. The pilot later wrote, “One of the survivors started climbing out of the aircraft and heard a baby crying; he went back inside, found the baby in an overhead bin where she had been tossed, took her out of the aircraft and brought her to her family that had been driven out by the thick smoke.”
Adults’ arms are no match for gravity, even in moderate trouble. When I was writing the Practical Traveler column for The Times, I visited the Civil Aeromedical Institute, operated by the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma City. In a lab were two dummies, each the size of a 6-month-old. One weighed 17 pounds, about average. The other weighed 51 pounds, what the same baby would weigh at 3G’s, a pull three times the force of gravity.
(reader comments on website)
December 19, 2007, 5:43 pm
The Safety Hazard on Your Lap
By Betsy Wade
[Correction Appended]
As to reckless aspects of air travel, I put the situation of the lap babies at the top. And at this time of year, don’t ask how many there are.
Lap babies are children under the age of 2 who travel free with adults on planes, but without tickets, with no seats of their own, without identification in the airline files or indeed any safety protection whatsoever. These infants and toddlers are the only passengers or crew members who are exempted from being latched into safety belts on takeoff and landing. They sit in parents’ laps and those parental arms are all that keeps them from hurtling through the air in turbulence or a crash landing.
A United Airlines plane that crashed in Sioux City after mechanical failure on July 19, 1989, was carrying a large number of children and lap babies. With a lot of luck and heroic work, 174 passengers of the 285 survived, and all but one of the 11 crew members. The pilot later wrote, “One of the survivors started climbing out of the aircraft and heard a baby crying; he went back inside, found the baby in an overhead bin where she had been tossed, took her out of the aircraft and brought her to her family that had been driven out by the thick smoke.”
Adults’ arms are no match for gravity, even in moderate trouble. When I was writing the Practical Traveler column for The Times, I visited the Civil Aeromedical Institute, operated by the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma City. In a lab were two dummies, each the size of a 6-month-old. One weighed 17 pounds, about average. The other weighed 51 pounds, what the same baby would weigh at 3G’s, a pull three times the force of gravity.
Last edited by a moderator: