Baby safety on plane

[Cw112]

So I'm going to preface this by saying I'm still recovering from bad PPA so please be gentle! I've been looking at a holiday abroad with dh and ds. We have been away together before and it all went really well but when we made it home safely I started thinking about what I would have done had there been an emergency on the plane, specifically what I would have done had we needed to enter the water with ds. I've always been a slightly nervous flier but since having ds it's got much worse. I can make myself do it but its very uncomfortable.

The flight emergency leaflets explain what to do while you're on the plane with your baby, how to use the infant life vest etc, but then any instructions as to what to do in the water don't involve any babies or infants. Adults are expected to hold hands in the water and form a circle... at that point what am I meant to do with baby? How do I inflate our life jackets in the water while holding baby at the same time?

I know logically that the chances of this happening are super slim but it helps a lot when I can create a rough plan in my head to 'solve' whatever horrible scenario my mind has created so I can push the thought away. I have spoken to my hv about it and for the most part I'm doing OK, just some days are a bit harder than others and this week hasn't been great for my mind giving me a variety of survival scenarios! Any advice?

They have lifecots for small babies and kids lifejackets.

Babies go into inflatable lifecoats.

Although if you enter the water 99.99% of the time you will die before you can even say where is my life jacket.

Baby life vests can be inflated before you leave the plane. Your own life jacket should be inflated as you leave plane, so at the top of the slide. You only need one hand to inflate it.

In the water itself? I don’t know; I would think hold tight to the baby with one hand and another person/group with the other.

Cabin crew here - you inflate all life jackets as you exit the aircraft door and enter the life raft, you shouldn't be in the water at all - the crew should board the raft and separate it from the aircraft and you all paddle away in happy unison, set off the locator beacon and await help ... in a text book water landing ... however, a ditching scenario is unlikely to end up like this, mind you, look at Sully who landed on the Hudson!

I don’t ever think about safety on a plane. You’re simply not going to crash. And if in that minuscule chance you did, you’d die anyway so there’s no point worrying.

In the kindest possible way, this is the sort of scenario it's best not thinking about. Planes are incredibly safe, but if things go wrong, well perhaps best not to dwell in it. Important thing when flying is to securely hold, or better still secure into a harness or seat for as much of the flight as possible as turbulence is a real possibility and does hurt people, but injuries are prevented by being secured.

I know it's often cited but your journey to the airport is statistically speaking more dangerous

Would you feel happier taking the Eurostar somewhere?

It narrows your choices but it’s an option.

The chance of landing on water and people having to use the slides/life jackets is vanishingly small.

Thanks so much everyone, I know it's one of the things it's best we don't think about and as I say logically I know that it's so so unlikely to ever be something I need to do in reality but at the moment my brain is quite unable to turn these thoughts off so sometimes the easiest thing for me to do is work through it to an end conclusion where I have a strategy so I can put it to bed. (Ideally one where noone is dead!) Then I generally don't get that specific recurring intrusive thought. Otherwise it can spin round in my head for hours and the accompanying mental images are pretty upsetting.

@Butternutsqoosh thanks so much, just knowing we'd be unlikely to be in the water and would inflate in advance has been all I needed to hear I feel one million miles better for just knowing that thank you.