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Prof. Graham Clark - RMIT University
Young children can be carried on commercial aircraft sitting on the lap of an adult.
However, this isn't a particularly safe way to do it and many people
prefer to use an automotive child restraint which sits in the seat
and is attached to the seat.
Mark Bathie, Airworthiness Engineer. Civil Aviation Authority
There are numerous issues with fitting automotive child restraints to aircraft.
They use different seat belts, the designs of the seat are different,
they're a different size.
The risk is that the automotive child restraint will change the behaviour
of the seat in a crash. It will not allow the seat to deform and move
in the crash and that might put people at risk in the area around it,
particularly of people in the row behind.
Adam Shrimpton, PhD Student - RMIT University
Nobody's ever modelled a situation like this yet that we're aware of
and ... which has meant that CASA has then had to say look we
need this complete model.
RMIT offered us a comprehensive computational analysis capability that CASA
just doesn't own. Obviously we don't have the research facilities that RMIT possesses.
Working with CASA's been great. The final outcome of this project
will be a computer model which will allow us to run simulations and
instead of going through the expense of crashing real seats
we'll be able to run computer simulations.
The benefits to CASA are that we'll be able to use for developing
guides materials and ultimately standards for child restraints to be used in aviation.