October 13, 2003
Proposal to require child restraint seats in airlines could cause more deaths than it prevents
Will the lives of young children be saved under a planned Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulation requiring children under two-years-old to have their own seats and ride in child-restraint seats? The new policy would ban the practice of children younger than two years old sitting in their parents’ laps.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center examined the potential benefits and costs of such a policy, taking into account the number of lives that might be saved and the number of families who might decide to drive rather than fly if the cost of a child’s airline ticket became a significant economic factor. Their findings are reported in the October 2003 issue of The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
The researchers found that use of child-restraint seats on airlines would prevent 0.4 child air crash deaths per year in the U.S. The number of deaths that could be prevented by use of mandatory child-restraint seats is limited because the number of deaths of unrestrained young children in survivable crashes is already low, the researchers write. According to the FAA’s own estimates, child-restraint seats could save five deaths in 10 years.
Using data on the relative risks of airline and motor vehicle travel based on the distance traveled and the number of airline takeoffs and landings, the researchers found that car deaths among children in this age group would actually exceed air crash deaths if 5-10 percent of parents decided to drive instead of fly.
“We conclude that a policy requiring child-restraint seat use on aircraft is likely to lead to a small net increase in death and injuries unless the cost of complying with the policy is low enough that fewer than 5 to 10 percent of families with young children switch from air to car travel,” the researchers write. “Even ignoring the possibility of increased car crash deaths, the small magnitude of potential benefit per young child makes the cost per life saved high unless the cost for young children to fly is close to zero. If the average round-trip cost per young child were $200, it would cost $1.28 billion for each life saved.”
The research was conducted by Dr. Thomas B. Newman of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine; and Drs. Brian D. Johnston and David C. Grossman of the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center and the University of Washington.
