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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Fasten those seatbelts!

Something I realized growing up, and perhaps this is a bias for others too: I always perceived of airline accidents as being crashes where everyone dies. Hence all the conspiracy silliness of “they just want to know what seat you were in to identify the body.”

But my goodness there’s so many ways to be badly hurt without a big crash.

In a way this feels akin to the highway bias: highways are far safer than city streets but a lot of people perceive them as being so dangerous.

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> But my goodness there’s so many ways to be badly hurt without a big crash.

I remember an incident involving a private jet about a decade ago. The jet was at cruising altitude when suddenly it hit an air pocket and precipitously lost altitude. This being a private jet the occupants (some Greek businessmen) were drinking champagne or whatever, fact is they weren't wearing their seatbelts. A few of them died right on the spot as the result of them violently hitting the plane's roof.

IIRC there's more than one incident report that'll mention something like "40 dents in the ceiling" from where all the unseatbelted folks got launched.

If you're seated in an airplane please make sure you've got your seatbelt on. You can have it a bit loose and it'll still protect you from this sort of nonsense much better than no seatbelt at all.

This is the top (but not only) reason keeping your baby/toddler in your lap instead of in their own seat, buckled into a carseat, is a terrible way to fly. Lap infants are far more likely to be injured in-flight than other children: https://journals.lww.com/pec-online/fulltext/2019/10000/in_f...

The carriers don't make this easy: they have conflicting rules on carseats for in-cabin use, especially if you're flying between the US and Europe, both of which have stringent carseat regulations, but absolutely no models that are approved for use in both. In practice, United allowed the EU carseat (used, bought specifically for the trip) and Lufthansa allowed a US carseat (more compact, bought for car use in the US), but both of their sites stated that they only allowed carseated approved by the airlines' local authorities: NHTSA (United) or TÜV (Lufthansa).

I'll note, however, that carrying multiple child seats onto an aircraft is simultaneously exhausting and humiliating.

Yeah, dealing with just one seat, plus the fractious toddler, minus a baggage cart, made me very glad that I was not traveling alone with said toddler, and that he should be large enough for a CARES belt to be adequate restraint the next time we plan to fly.

> Lap infants are far more likely to be injured in-flight than other children: https://journals.lww.com/pec-online/fulltext/2019/10000/in_f...

In case anyone is curious, this source does claim that "lap infants" are more likely to be injured than other passengers. But the article defines "lap infant" as anyone under 2 years old, regardless of whether they were in fact in someone's lap. (In particular, some of these "lap infants" fell from the cot!)

Potentially worth quoting as well: "Scalding burns from hot beverages or soups spilled over a child during hot meal service were the most commonly identified mechanism of injury".

Am I reading this correctly that not only is the definition of 'lap infant' not dependent on whether a child was in someone's lap or not, it also would include a child younger than 24 months who was restrained in a car seat at the time of the in-flight injury?

> For the purpose of this study, the term in-flight injury was used to denote medical events caused by injuries (ie, trauma or burns) that occurred or manifested themselves during flight. Lap infants were defined as passengers younger than 24 months, the age until which a child is allowed to travel while sharing a seat with an adult passenger.

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