I do want to point out that Adventuredad has made some incorrect statements. Children can and have been injured in turbulence
Please don't put words in my mouth. I have not said kids are NEVER injured on planes. I've said its
almost unheard of for children to be damaged by turbulence which is completely true.If you've been a flight attendant you should clearly know this. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of flights each year globally. Despite this massive amount of flights it's almost unheard of to have children injured on planes. This is official statistics, it's not something I'm making up.
Please feel free to provide statistics about all the thousands of children injured by turbulence and how many fatalities are caused by turbulence. There is no such data since kids on planes are safe.
If you've worked in the industry you should also know that a high percentage of the extremely few turbulence related accidents are caused by people not using a seat belt at all. Fasten seat belt sign is on but people don't use a seat belt. That's stupid. Lap belt and seat belt provide plenty of protection which all data shows.
The statement below sums up well just how safe flying is. That's during a 15 year period:
From 1981 to November, 1996, there were 252 reports of turbulence affecting major air carriers. As a result, two passengers died, 63 suffered serious injuries, and 863 received minor injuries. Both of the fatalities in these incidents involved passengers who were not wearing their seat belts while the seat belt sign was illuminated. Of the 63 passengers who were seriously injured, 59 were not wearing their seat belts while the seat belt sign was illuminated.
Also, when it comes down to checking car seats as luggage, people like Adventuredad will ALWAYS post and say "I did it and it went fine". The fact is that their seats could have been damaged and they don't know it. They only way they would find out is if they were in an accident and the seat didn't hold up the way it's supposed to. I hope they never find this out!
Car seats are not delicate glass ware, seats can handle more abuse than you can dream of. I pack my sets in special padded car seat bags with additional padding. Something could surely happen but seats are of course inspected before use. That's what I use, anyone can transport their seats anyway they want to.
I'm well aware that seats could get injured and also that they could be delayed or lost. I usually have a backup plan in case this would happen.
You don't seem to have experience in how seats are transported to dealers. Seats are not padded, only in thin original plastic wrap, in a thin card board box. This is how seats go by plane, boat, truck, plane, etc. Your seat got to the dealer in a similar way as you transported it by plane to France. Or do you think each seat is hand carried all the way? I work with this every day and have seen the routines.
If you want to check your seat as luggage you might want to wrap your seat in three layers of bubble wrap first. Thats how I transport all seats when shipped globally. it offer good protection. Shipping it in an original box would provide poor protection and I would not advice anyone doing this.
using a car seat on board greatly increases your child's chances of surviving an accident
That's like planning for you 100 million Lotto check that MIGHT come next week. Accidents by plane are extremely rare and also often deadly. The amount of children saved by car seats in the past 30 years is extremely small. A rational person would look at the many billions of flights made and easily see that risks are insignificant. It might not FEEL that way but that's the way it is.
The difference between using a car seat on the plane and using nothing is as close to zero as you will ever get. It's safer but the difference is insignificant. Are you seriously saying you should use a car seat purely to potentially survive a crash? With that kind of logic you should keep your kids in a bubble and never go outside. Fact is anything you do is more dangerous for your kids than flying. No sure if you have done much math in school but looking at the probability of such an occurrence would make even the most paranoid person feel safe.
By putting this tremendous focus, I mean in general and not really this thread, on the dangers of flying we're causing many less informed parents to focus on the wrong thing. May are actually think kids are at high risk on planes without a car seat (not OP). IMHO it would save far more lives to foucs more on things such as rear facing longer or unreestrained kids in cars. This kills many kids each year, flying without a car eat does not.
We can discuss this forever. If you feel like flying is such a risky thing for children, please provide something that support this. Then we can discuss this further. Not opinions, real data. All official data and statistics say exactly the opposite, that flying with kids is the safest thing we can do regardless if using a car seat or not.
If you have some interesting statistics or data showing danger to kids on planes, please feel free to send a PM and we can discuss it further.