In the controversy’s latest twist, the National Transportation Safety Board last week recommended that every baby and infant be required to sit in special child-restraint seats during airline flights. Urging the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt the proposal, NTSB chairman James Kolstad noted that “all objects must be secured during takeoff and landing, including coffee pots and luggage. And yet . . . our precious children are not.” Not surprisingly, the airline industry enthusiastically endorses such a rule. At present, babies under the age of 2 fly free if held on a parent’s lap. But if parents were required to buy an extra seat on which to set a safety seat, the airlines could reap as much as $250 million in additional revenue in the first year.
Opponents of the proposed regulation question both its economic impact and lifesaving efficacy. According to a study by the FAA, which has not yet been released, a safety-seat law would boost the cost of flying with an infant by an average of$185 per family. As a result, the study estimates, a full 20 percent of families with young children couldn’t afford to fly and would either not travel or resort to driving–a statistically more dangerous form of transport for all ages. But the study’s most surprising conclusion was drawn from the past: making safety seats mandatory would have prevented only two infant deaths over the past 14 years. (The remaining child fatalities occurred in cabin sections where no one survived.) Given the complexity of the dispute, the FAA could take as long as a year to decide whether the era of the free-riding lap baby should be ended.
Curious contrast: Whatever the outcome, the NTSB’s vigorous advocacy of safety seats stands in curious contrast to its attitude toward another child-related issue: requiring seat belts on school buses. For years, parents’ groups have pressed for such a federal law with what seems like unassailable logic. If seat belts save lives in cars, they argue, shouldn’t school buses have them, too? The manufacturers and operators of school buses, however, maintain that installing seat belts would be prohibitively expensive and even dangerous in some circumstances. Last year a National Research Council study concluded that equipping large school buses with seat belts would cost $40 million annually and save an average of only one life a year. That concurred with an earlier transportation-board recommendation against requiring such restraints. “School buses,” says the NTSB’s Kolstad, “have one of the best safety records of any form of transportation.”
So, in fact, do airliners, and therein lies the most baffling question. If the cost-benefit ratios of both safety seats in planes and seat belts in buses suggest they’re not worth mandating, why is the former receiving such a strong governmental push? The answer, perhaps, may be found in Washington’s overriding legislative rule: when the interests of a powerful lobby coincide with what seems like common sense, regulation tends to get off the ground.
