News & Advice

NTSB Wants Infants to Have Their Own Seats on Planes

Kids under two need seatbelts, too, according to the latest safety recommendations.
CNT Intel Illo Illustration Family Travel with Child
T.M. Detwiler

All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The NTSB wants all kids to have their own seats.

T.M. Detwiler

While the FBI has its 10 most wanted criminals around the world, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has just released its own annual "most wanted" list—for safety improvements across planes, trains, and automobiles. Sure, it's not as high profile as the FBI's, but it may affect our day-to-day lives even more, especially when some of their suggested improvements change how we book tickets. This year, the NTSB is urging the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to stop allowing lap children—kids under two who fly for free in their parent's lap on most airlines—and require that young infants and babies have their own seat. This isn't the first time the've made this recommendation, either: The NTSB asked for similar infant airline regulations in 2017, 2016, and 2014, to no avail.

"We are careful to strap our children into car seats when we drive to the airport; we should be as diligent in securing them in their own seat aboard the aircraft," the safety board wrote in its first mention of children's safety on airplanes on its most wanted list in 2014. Now, five years later, the board is sticking to its statement, asking again for the FAA and airlines to require their "most vulnerable passengers" get their own seat, expressing concerns that infants are "at risk of serious injury and death" if turbulence strikes and they're not secured in their own seat mid-flight.

"With turbulence, the automatic reaction of the parent, of anyone, is to brace. And that means the infant is temporarily let go," NTSB board member Earl Weener says. In fact, most injuries in the aviation space are turbulence-related, whether you're 52 or 2 years old—and the NTSB is currently in the midst of studying turbulence injuries, though a release date of the study has not been announced, Weener says.

Beyond just getting their own seat, the NTSB suggests all passengers with kids under 2 use an FAA-approved car seat, strapped into its own seat next to a parent, or a safety restraint system, like the Cares Child Airplane Travel Harness—the only FAA-approved child safety device for children over the age of one.

Just because the NTSB wants the FAA to make new regulations and enforce seats for infants doesn't mean it will happen. The NTSB—which is in charge of investigating every aviation accident, along with every major accident on railroads, pipelines, highways, and across oceans—is completely separate from the FAA, which creates and enforces aviation safety regulations and manages air traffic. "We continue to emphasize this but the real change has to come from the FAA. They have to show the cost-benefit [of paying for a seat for infants]," Weener says.

While the FAA "strongly urges" you to secure your child with a car seat or seatbelt in his or her own seat (it has a whole webpage dedicated to exactly that), it has not changed its regulations. The reasoning? Asking parents to pay for a full seat would “force some families who can’t afford the extra ticket to drive, a statistically more dangerous way to travel,” the agency said when this lap children question was brought up in 2014, per The Seattle Times.

While you won't necessarily see airlines starting to charge for kids under two ASAP, that doesn't mean you can't take matters into your own hands when it comes to infant safety. We talked to parents last year on a family travel episode of our podcast Travelogue, and infant safety was a hot topic. "You go to the corner store and you drive a few minutes at 7 miles per hour, you would never not use a car seat. So this idea that we're on these planes and we could hit turbulence and we're just not strapping our kids in, it doesn't make any sense to anyone," Skift's Brian Sumers told the episode's host, Laura Redman. It's not worth saving $200, he said. Need to know when to switch from the car seat to the harness? Places to Love's Samantha Brown, mom to twins who use the Cares seatbelt, said it depends on how much squirm you want to put up with. "When our children were [under] three, the car seats for them were something more secure...it becomes their world and they slept. When we used the Cares harness when they were three, they had too much room, they thought they could get down," she said on the episode. Listen to the full episode for more family travel tips and find out what other gear—car seats included—made the cut for these expert parent travelers.