One New Regulation Would Change The World For Parents Flying With Children

Remember when airlines tried to make it easier for parents to fly instead of fighting them?

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Ironically, I also flew back from San Francisco this weekend, with my two small children. Luckily, no flight attendant tried to fight me. A big part of that is because we fly JetBlue, which kind of exists because “not being a dick about everything” is still a fairly revolutionary concept in air travel.

But an even bigger part is that my wife and I are fairly high-functioning, literate individuals, who are willing and able to burn money to increase the chances we land at our destination without becoming YouTube stars.

Being able to throw money at the problem is crucial for parents flying with children. On American Airlines this weekend, everything started to go wrong for the crying mother when she tried to take her double-wide stroller on the plane, instead of gate checking it. I empathize with her pain. But my family checked our Mars dune-buggy of a stroller curbside. We had other foldable carrying implements to get our kids through security and onto the plane. The kids were relatively quiet, because we had enough travel-sized games and foods to survive a week stranded in the Alps. Our major inconvenience was when TSA decided that my wife needed to be molested in front of our children, while throwing away some Play-doh that we could just repurchase anyway.

Despite all of our privilege and advantages, we shared one common problem with the crying mother that really screams out for better regulation: we had to board the plane when it was already half-full.

Back when I was a kid, parents flying with children got to board first, right alongside disabled people. This made sense. Kids are assholes, parents are loaded up with carry-on bags like donkeys. Getting parents and their urchins on planes before the scrum makes things infinitely easier for parents.

Now, disabled people board first, then first class, then people with various points/club/member upgrades. Then people who pay more to sit in the exit row (airlines have figured out how to monetize safety regulations). On JetBlue at least, they sell “even more speed” tickets for people who are willing to pay more to board, like, two minutes earlier. Parents are given “courtesy” boarding before general boarding, at the same time as active military.

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Get it? It’s a courtesy. Sure you are flying with small monsters who would crawl under people’s legs to get to their seat if you weren’t physically restraining them, so why don’t you board with people who defend our country because… the airline industry cares!

At one point during our travel, someone asked me if I wanted to gate-check my diaper bag, because they were running out of overhead space. “No. And nobody on this plane wants me to do that either.”

This is a place where it would seem appropriate for a little regulation to step in and check the market. Obviously, the airline industry has figured out a way to monetize people’s desire to get onto the plane FIRST. We can perhaps philosophize about how we live in a culture where getting seated early on a contraption that cannot leave until everybody is seated has developed into a profit center for the industry, but we must accept that it is so. “The market” will not bring back early boarding for parents.

The law can.

The law has already taken away or made it much harder for parents flying with children in so many other ways. You can’t bring liquids from home unless you hold them in your cheek and regurgitate them into your children’s mouths like you are a penguin family. You can’t bring Play-doh (apparently). There’s no overhead space for a stroller. No, little Johnny, you cannot see the cockpit, because some asshole might try to fly the plane into a building. I don’t want to give American or United any ideas, but we can’t be far away from airlines charging you extra if you don’t voluntarily chloroform your kids before takeoff.

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But priority boarding for parents with children, say, under seven, would make things so much easier. Parents could secure their brood, and all their stuff, without competing for overhead space, and without climbing over other passengers. Flight attendants could identify families, educate them about any rules the family was not aware of, and then clear the aisles for the rest of the paying customers to quickly and efficiently get on the plane.

(Speaking of efficiency, OBVIOUSLY parents with children should be the last people to de-plane once you reach your destination. It makes no earthly sense for parents to try to shuttle their kids off while half the plane is still waiting to get free of the flying sardine can. If parents aren’t smart enough to figure that out on their own, that should be a rule too. Sit down, and shove a phone in your kids’ faces, until you can grab all your crap without stopping “buh-bye” traffic.)

There’s no downside. There’s no money in it for the airlines, but there’s no downside. Until somebody disrupts the airline industry with Urchins Air, it’s a good regulation. And it can’t be any harder to implement than the “no fight club” regs currently being pondered by Congress.

‘Come on, hit me’ – Confrontation disrupts American Airlines flight from S.F. [Sacramento Bee]


Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.