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 Putting Your Heirs In The Air
How to pamper your most precious cargo on cross-country expeditions
by Phaedra Hise | Photography by Joanne Persico/Marco Pedde
Aren’t you the lucky one, with the airplane full of crushed Cheerios, used Baby Wipes, and Crayola-spangled upholstery? No, really, I mean it. Flying with young children can be a logistical hassle, but there’s a generous payoff: You not only create priceless family memories, but the pilot with happy passengers gets to log more hours than the one with kids who hate to fly.
My sister and I logged many childhood hours crammed in the back of my father’s Mooney. Right from the start, I loved to fly, but my sister barfed every time we flew and quickly came to dread our trips. I can’t promise that your kids will turn into me, but a little preparation should ensure that they have a better time than my sister did. The key is to make each flight enjoyable enough that your pint-size passengers can’t wait to leap back into the plane.
Flight Plan: Infants and Toddlers
Most infants and toddlers sleep when aloft, so keeping them comfortable is your primary objective.
Begin with hearing protection, essential for children in this age group. Child-sized headsets are fine for toddlers who’ll leave them in place, but they might not fit babies, who tend to squirm and push them off. A better idea is to cut foam earplugs in half lengthwise and gently insert them; then tie on a bonnet to keep tiny fingers away. Once a child can wear a headset that’s linked to the airplane’s intercom system, an isolate function is a must. Trust the voice of experience—a pilot accepting approach instructions in the soup doesn’t need a squalling baby on the frequency.
Tiny ears need to be equalized during descent. This can be achieved by having mom nurse the baby or offer a bottle. Likewise, toddlers can drink liquids from a bottle; avoid sippy cups with straws as they tend to leak at altitude. Use the “comments” section of your flight plan to mention an infant aboard—controllers will be more likely to issue a gentle descent, and emergency personnel can be alerted, if necessary.
Bite-sized snacks are a fun distraction for toddlers, and fortunately airsickness is uncommon at this age. When it happens, it’s usually minimal and tends to remain on the child or car seat, both of which can be washed. When our child was born, my husband and I happened to need a new interior in our Bonanza, so we chose leather for ease of cleanup. It added a little weight, but we’ve never regretted it.
Entertaining a toddler in flight can be as easy as packing a few books and toys—let the child choose some favorites. Wrapping a few small gifts makes the trip memorable and serves as a double distraction as the child opens and then plays with each new toy.
Obviously, infants require a lot of tending, which changes the dynamics of a flight. Whenever my husband and I flew with our infant, Lily, the nonflying pilot was strictly on baby duty (riding in back makes that job easier). That’s an essential crew member, as I discovered during one unnerving solo flight over storm-obscured Long Island, N.Y. Monitoring the stormscope, planning re-routing and following the ever-changing controller directions while Lily chattered next to me proved exhausting. I decided right then that the workload for single-pilot IFR with an infant was simply too much for me. I waited until my daughter was five years old before I tried again, with far greater success.
Flight Plan: School-Age Children
School-age kids require active in-flight management—but they’re also at just the right age to thrill to the excitement of the trip. This is when flying with children really becomes fun.
The prerequisite for fun is safety. Establish rules early and review them frequently. For example, children must ask before touching anything up front, stay clear of all propellers, and maintain a quiet “sterile cockpit” during takeoff and landing.
Nancy and Barry Sanders travel regularly from the airstrip in front of their Tennessee home to Colorado, Wisconsin, and the Bahamas with their daughters Skye, 11, Star, 8, and Summer, 6, in tow. All three girls learned safety rules right away. “Stay away from propellers, moving or not” is Nancy’s No. 1 command. The girls were taught never to play with the rear windows in the family’s Bonanza, but on one all-too-memorable flight, Star leaned forward from her father’s lap and turned off the magnetos.
“Now they have to ask before they touch anything,” Nancy says emphatically.
The sting of “don’t touch” can be soothed somewhat—and the anticipation of flying kicked up a notch—by assigning certain preflight and in-flight tasks to your youngsters. Younger children, especially, often delight in having the responsibility. As kids get older, parents will soon understand who wants to pitch in and who prefers to just settle in and sleep.
Rich Hare, who lives in a Detroit suburb, remembers that when his now college-age children were 10 or 12, they enjoyed cleaning the windshield. “They used to ask if we could go out and wash the plane,” Hare recalls. “As they got older, those jobs lost their appeal.”
As with passengers of any age, comfort level is a key component of keeping school-age kids happy during a flight..
Those backseats are small, but they’re not sized for little kids. Children will be more content if they can make a little “nest.” In smooth cruise, let them spread out on the seats and floor and snuggle in. It’s usually colder back there, too, so bring plenty of pillows and blankets.
Don’t abandon booster seats just because your child has outgrown them for the car. If the word “booster” sends out negative vibes, then bring a few extra cushions instead. Even adults use those to see over the nose.
Many aviating families do in planes what they do on car trips: They bring tidy snacks, suitable toys, and books, and they visit the bathroom before takeoff. In-air potty options are limited—some parents tote jars or zipper-top plastic bags stuffed with paper towels. Disposable diapers or absorbent pull-up pants present the most leakproof option for young children, but just try getting one on a newly potty-trained-and-proud toddler, not to mention a first- or second-grader strapped in for a longer flight.
The Brown family of Charlotte, NC, takes along a small Tupperware container when flying with their 10-year-old daughter in their Cessna 170. “Even if you decide to land, it can take 30 minutes to find an airport and descend,” Polly Brown says. The container acts as both emergency toilet and barf bowl. “On one flight home, Autumn had a virus, and airsickness bags just wouldn’t have done the job,” Polly remembers.
This brings up one of the biggest dilemmas related to flying with small children: to stop or not to stop? Delays are frustrating for the pilot, but for passengers a stop can be reassuring. Bumping around the backseat of a small airplane can be a little freaky. Add a full bladder or floppy stomach to that scenario and you’ve got one very wiggy child.
“I made the rule that my family’s comfort is my command,” notes Hare, who made many long family flights while his kids were young. “If at any time they needed a comfort stop or weren’t feeling well, we stopped. I rarely needed to make good on that offer, though—I think just knowing they could stop reduced the need to do so.” Hare says the tradeoff of happy passengers for a later arrival was always well worth it, since upset passengers can quickly become a serious cockpit distraction—both emotionally and physically.
Similarly, don’t overlook the positive effect of promising small children a treat as a reward for their participation in a trip. Parents tend to think the destination itself will be sufficiently rewarding, but young children don’t necessarily see things that way. Flying to an especially kid-friendly location, enjoying a postflight ice cream at a local sweet shop, or even letting your daughter take her entire Barbie collection on board will make the child more likely to happily anticipate the next flight.
The Sanders family regularly flies to a nearby pancake house for breakfast, where the girls also get to play in a much-beloved mud pile (they change out of their dirty clothes for the flight home). A love of mud may not necessarily be why Skye, Star, and Summer all love to fly—but all three learned how to hold a heading by the time they were six, and each has her own logbook.
The eldest has logged more than 400 hours, and her dad, a CFI, is already giving her lessons in the family’s Cessna 152.
 Flight Plan: Older Children and Teenagers
Older kids are either avid flight students or not, and they’re better able to take care of themselves. Your teenager’s awed friends might start asking for rides—presenting a great opportunity for your kids score social brownie points with their peers while you log a few Young Eagle flights.
But don’t push too hard. For an eager parent, it can be difficult to go with the flow and let the child dictate the tenor of the aviation experience. For some children, the airplane will never be more than a noisy and fast way to get around. Don’t press them to learn about navigation, for example, if they prefer to read, nap, or watch a movie during the trip. Give them a portable DVD or video player, with ear buds that fit under their headsets, or plug the unit into the intercom system and select the “passenger” option.
Other kids will make it clear that they want to be more involved. “I used to mostly ride in back, but now I’m going to start being next to my dad,” says Autumn Brown. “I like being up there and sometimes he lets me fly.” Indulging an interested child may mean a few years of parents drawing straws for the backseat, but consider this an investment in your child’s education. At this age, children can learn while helping—Autumn jots down controller chatter so her dad doesn’t have to ask for read-backs. The only problem a pilot parent is likely to encounter with this kind of kid is coming up with the tuition for flight school.
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Want to share your family experiences with other aviators, chat with others on stuck mic forum. |
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Ideally, our children will grow up to love aviation and clamor to learn to fly. Barry Sanders has begun to teach his daughter Skye to fly. Autumn Brown’s father, Ray, lets her take the yoke from time to time. My father was my CFI, and I’m considering instructor training myself so I will be ready to teach Lily. Flight training is a gift that nearly every pilot would love to pass along.
Even if your kids don’t love to fly, you can still provide them with them fond memories of family trips in the airplane. Whether you’re taking up your newborn, indulging a nephew, or introducing your high schooler to a long-awaited, new airplane, take time to see the flight from the child’s perspective and do your best to make it fun. 
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