The Reader’s Page : Seating Snarls

Regarding the Aug. 22 Travel Insider column (“Airlines Tackling the Squeezed-Seat Problem”): Packing up to move, I came across a diary I had started when I returned to Europe in October 1961. One entry was: “It was very hard to sleep that night. There wasn’t much leg room, and as time passed it got quite hot.”

At least the air conditioning has improved with time.

MARVIN L. PULIN

Anaheim

I read with interest your article on airline seats, especially the part about the debate over infant safety requirements in aircraft. I thought you might like to hear what I was told by a flight attendant on a flight I took last month from Houston to Orange County.

My 7-week-old, 10-pound son and I were both ticketed passengers on this flight. I placed him in his Federal Aviation Administration-approved car seat in the rear-facing position in a window seat, as the FAA recommends. The senior flight attendant informed me that if the passenger seated directly in front of my son wished to recline her seat, I would have to either turn his car seat around so that he would be facing forward or remove him from his car seat entirely.

I politely but firmly Informed her that I would not turn his car seat around. The FAA recommends that infants weighing less than 20 pounds sit in a rear-facing position.

The attendant got quite nasty and said that as a “paying customer,” this passenger has a right to recline her seat. Once the attendant found out my son was a ticketed passenger, she backed off a bit. I was truly shocked that the attendant was practically forcing me to go against FAA recommendations by turning my son’s car seat around.

The airline badly needs to inform its flight attendants about FAA recommendations in this area.

LISA RUDY

Arlington, Va.