Flight Attendants Want To Make Families Pay A Lot More To Fly… Here’s Why

The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), the largest crewmember union in the United States with tens of thousands of members at major carriers like United, Alaska and Spirit Airlines, is once again calling for parents traveling with infants to pay a lot more to fly.

The reason isn’t a simple money grab as you might first fear, but rather an insistence on making parents pay for a separate seat for any infant aged up to two years old, so that they can travel in a child car seat.

In the United States, infants under two can travel as a so-called ‘lap infant,’ which means they travel on the lap of their parent for the duration of the flight. This means that new parents can save a lot of cash, but the union fears this is an intolerable risk to safety.

The call for a ban on lap infants from the AFA-CWA isn’t anything new, but it’s come in for renewed focus following the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) publication of the probable cause of the mid-cabin exit door blowout on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737MAX on January 5, 2024.

On board the ill-fated jet were three lap infants who were only secured by their parents arms as anything not strapped down was sucked out of the gaping hole in the fuselage of the airplane.

While none of the three lap infants on Alaska Flight AS-1282 were injured, the NTSB says the accident once again shows the “potential for severe injury or death” for children who are not secured in an approved child restraint in their own seat.

The agency was highly critical of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airline industry during a board meeting late last month, saying:

“The Federal Aviation Administration’s emphasis on increasing voluntary usage of child restraint systems, rather than mandating their use as the National Transportation Safety Board has long recommended, has continued to allow children under the age of 2 years to travel on board aircraft at a lower level of safety than that of seat belt-wearing adult passengers.”

Is anything going to happen to change the status quo in the short term? Probably not.

The NTSB is calling on the FAA to conduct a study to work out why parents are using child restraint devices for their infants, although it probably wouldn’t be a surprise if cost is a major deciding factor for many parents.

Major airlines, including American Airlines, Delta, and United, as well as Alaska Airlines, actively promote their lap infant policies, while not offering any form of discount for infants to be accommodated in their own seats.

That’s something that the NTSB would like to change, with the agency calling on major industry lobby group Airlines for America to develop a program that would encourage parents to use an approved child restraint device for their infant, which would obviously involve buying a separate seat for them.

None of the airlines listed above currently recommend that parents use a child restraint device instead of opting for their child to travel a lap infant.

One other potential issue is that parents must provide their own FAA-approved child car seat, making traveling with a little one even more cumbersome and frustrating. None of the listed airlines offer a loaner service, which could put parents off paying for a separate seat.

“America’s aviation system is the safest and most secure in the world, but there are still many dangers for unsecured children,” warned the AFA-CWA a couple of years ago.

And it’s not just major accidents like Alaska Flight AS-1282 that flight attendants are worried about.

“Simple accidents like falling from a parent’s lap pose real risk,” the union cautioned. “Our aviation system is also seeing a steep rise in extreme turbulence, which can lead to tragedy for any passenger who isn’t properly secured, but is especially dangerous for infants and toddlers.”

“We can’t continue to put our youngest and most vulnerable passengers in unnecessary danger,” a spokesperson for the union implored. “It’s time to require a seat for every passenger and protect our youngest travelers.”

In many other countries, lap infants must be secured to their parent via a special infant seatbelt which attaches to the parent’s seatbelt.

While this is standard practice in most parts of the world, infant seatbelts have never been approved in the United States over fears they could cause more harm than good.

 “Extensive FAA testing showed that most harness vests [such as an infant extension seatbelt] fail to protect the child and can result in the child being crushed by the adult’s weight if sudden braking or impact occurs,” the agency said in a statement last month, which referred to tests dating back to 2015.

“The type of physical harm that children in harnesses attached to an adult could experience has not changed since the agency conducted those tests,” the statement from the FAA continued.