FAA warns parents to stop holding babies on laps on planes, fearing babies could be sucked out of planes if more commercial airline doors are blown off

Experts are warning parents not to hold children on their laps while flying after a panel blew off on an Alaska Airlines plane at 16,000 feet.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) say that if a child were sitting on their parent’s lap near the window, they would have been swept from the plane.

The agencies are urging parents to buy a separate seat for their children, despite guidelines allowing children under two to fly for free after last week’s ‘truly terrifying’ incident.

“The safest place for a child under two years of age is an approved child seat or device, not an adult’s lap,” the FAA told Dailymail.com.

Parents are currently not required to purchase separate seats for infants and may hold them on their laps, but the child’s protection would outweigh the financial toll of spending more money to fly, the FAA and NTSB said.

When asked how the FAA responds to parents who may argue that they cannot afford to purchase a child safety seat for their child, the FAA said only, “For each rule, the FAA is required by law to provide a cost assessment.” conduct a benefit analysis to demonstrate that the FAA believes the benefits of the proposal exceed the costs.’

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was forced to land when a window panel blew out of the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane shortly after takeoff.

Debris from two cellphones, a chair back and a tray were sucked out of the gaping hole and later found on the ground in the Portland area.

After the incident, all Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft were grounded while the FAA and NTSB investigated what caused the panel to blow out.

Federal investigators said a preliminary inspection showed loose bolts may have been the cause, after United and Alaska Airlines said they found loose parts in the door panels during Boeing 737 Max 9 inspections.

The leading cause of airplane accidents among children is unexpected turbulence, but the Alaska Airlines incident brought renewed concerns about unsecured babies to the forefront of aviation safety.

There were three babies on board the Alaska Airlines flight, but none of them sat in the aisle where the window blew out.

A window panel blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight, raising concerns that an unsecured child could have been sucked from the plane

The panel flew out of the aircraft while at 16,000 feet. Toys, phones and clothes were sucked into the night after the plug door ‘left the plane’, causing an immediate decompression with 171 passengers aboard Flight 1282 on Friday evening

“If there had been a passenger holding a child near where that panel went off, the explosive force was such that a child being held would have been ripped from the hands of his parents and they would have been sucked out of the plane ,” Kwasi Adjekum, assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics at the University of North Dakota, shared The Washington Post.

“The practice of holding children on your lap, especially during take-off and other vulnerable phases of flight, is highly frowned upon and discouraged,” Adjekum added.

Dailymail.com also asked the FAA whether it should focus on aircraft safety first instead of resorting to parents paying for an extra seat.

The FAA said, “The FAA’s priority is to protect the public.”

The agency has a Emergency Airworthiness Directive to Boeing for its 737 Max 9 aircraft, grounding them until all “applicable corrective actions have been implemented.”

Anthony Brickhouse, a professor of aerospace safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, questioned why children have to be in a car seat if they are in a vehicle under a certain weight, while parents are allowed to hold them on their laps in a commercial. flight.

“To me, that’s just a hole in the system,” Brickhouse told The Post, adding, “And unfortunately, in terms of safety, changes often don’t happen until a tragedy occurs.”

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) say that if a baby were sitting on his parent’s lap near the window, he or she would have been swept from the plane.

Yet tragedies have occurred regularly as early as the 1970s, prompting the NTSB and FAA in 1990 to require airlines to allow airline-approved child seats on board.

The NTSB sent one letter to the FAA in 1990, asking the agency to approve airline car seats, citing numerous in-flight emergencies that resulted in infant injuries or fatalities.

“The difficulties experienced by these three parents graphically illustrate the impossibility of holding a child during an accident,” the NTSB said at the time.

The FAA proposed a regulation in 2003 that would require children under the age of two to sit in child seats on airplanes.

However, pediatricians argued that this would be counterproductive and ultimately cause more fatalities than it prevents.

Pediatricians claimed that more deaths result from car accidents than from airplanes, and that forcing parents to buy an extra ticket for their child would result in parents choosing to drive to their destination rather than fly.

In light of the recent Alaska Airlines fiasco, the NTSB and FAA appear to be reconsidering this idea, although no proposed regulations have been issued.

Adjekum said U.S. regulators expressed concern that strapping a child to a seat would delay the evacuation of planes in an emergency and could pose a “potential obstacle hazard” to other passengers.

Dailymail.com has contacted the NTSB and several airlines for comment.