Campaigners for and against rules requiring child restraint systems (CRSs) for U.S. airline passengers under age 2 generally were unyielding when they recently reiterated their long-held positions. Both camps agreed, however, that as long as the youngest passengers travel under this 58-year-old exception to seat belt rules, airlines should promote voluntary use of CRSs approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and work hard to accommodate them.
For a few of these participants, another point of agreement during the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Child Passenger Safety Forum in December 2010 was the recognition that — despite safety management systems becoming the norm in civil aviation — there has been minimal collection and analysis of CRS usage-versus-injury data from line operations. Now, growing use of aviation CRSs and near-term prospects for superior designs might help justify new studies to better gauge effectiveness of this injury mitiga…
