What Experts Say:

All children 40 lbs and under should be in child safety seats on airplanes.

~The National Safe Kids Campaign

History of Child Safety Restraints

This is the first part in a five-part series on the history of child safety restraints in vehicles by Louise Stoll, the managing director of CARES

Child safety in aviation is the embarrassing safety gap in the world of modern transportation.

While keeping children safe in automobiles has increasingly become a serious concern of government, the medical profession, and child safety organizations over the past 35 years, child aviation safety is still in its infancy. Dozens of different kinds of car seats confront us in stores and catalogues, each larger, heavier and more complicated than the next, all unsuited to hauling through an airport and installing in a narrow airplane seat to keep a youngster secure in turbulence or rough landings.

There is, however, progress to report.

We have come a long way toward protecting our young in automobiles. Well into the 1960s, while their parents drove, children rolled around on mattresses in the back of station wagons or sat on people’s laps – people who were themselves unsecured and even in the front seat. No one would dream of letting this go on today, and child safety in automobiles is backed up by federal and state law as well as financial penalties.

Yet that 1960’s paradigm is the state of affairs today for young children traveling in airplanes. That said, the story of child restraints in airplanes is closely wedded to that ubiquitous child restraint now found in American family cars: the car seat.

So, a bit of history:

Primitive automobile restraints for children began to appear in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s shortly after adult seat belts made their appearance. The children’s devices were often no more than a narrow canvas belt around the waist of a child that was threaded through a vertical strap fastened around the back portion of the rear seat. This enabled the child to stand up and bounce all over the place, but presumably prevented her from flying out the window if the car stopped abruptly.

The first actual car seat I used for my children was a canvass sling type seat hung over the top of the back seat with aluminum inverted “U” tubing. The “seat” was designed to pivot forward and upwards like a rocking chair on its backwards swing so the child in the seat would be tilted back, legs upward and would not be catapulted forward. Of course, the child was not belted in, but we didn’t even think about that!

As the number of automobiles on the road increased, highway injuries and deaths also increased and the vulnerability of passengers - and especially children - traveling 50 or 60 miles an hour in a shell of metal became a national concern. In the early1980’s statistics compiled by the US Department of Transportation demonstrated dramatically that lives were saved and injuries reduced when people in cars used seat belts.

In the 1980’s NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, mandated the use of car seats for children, established crash-withstanding standards for car seat construction, and initiated educational programs to promote car seat use. The American Academy of Pediatrics, child advocacy and safety groups, and PTA’s joined in. Proper installation was a problem, and to this day, spot checks around the country indicate that in some areas as many as 70% of car seats are not installed properly. Today most hospitals require newborns to be sent home in a properly installed, aft facing, car seat.

The basic design of car seats essentially hasn’t changed in 30 years – except that they have grown larger and heavier and acquired bells and whistles such as cup holders, leather padding and fancy logos. They are constructed with a rigid frame, a padded insert, canvas straps that buckle the child to the frame, and slots for threading the regular seat belt through the back of the restraint to hold it against the back seat of the car. Newer models may have a clipping device to secure them to a receiving end sometimes built into the back seat of newer model cars. Today’s car seats generally weigh between 15 and 25 lbs, and grow larger and bulkier each year.

What has changed is the realization that kids don’t outgrow the need for more protection than the seat belt alone offers when they reach the 44 lb limit that initially defined car seat usage. So the booster seat, which helps protect children from 44-60 pounds –and even heavier - was devised and in some states mandated - about a decade ago. Booster seats do not have a belting arrangement of their own, but rather, work with the now common place automobile shoulder strap to hold the child in place.

Thus, over the years, a kind of “culture of safe travel” for children developed in America focused on the automobile. Throughout these five decades, even as air travel dramatically increased, the discussion of safe travel for kids in airplanes was a far more muted discussion, carried on by a much smaller number of people, and met with resistance by the aviation industry.