[jorpal]

No one wants to pay full airfare for an infant:

> Hoffman recognizes the drawbacks of requiring parents to purchase airplane tickets for their youngsters. The main concern is that families will not be able to afford the airfare and will resort to driving, a more perilous mode of transportation.

>“If they travel by car instead, they will actually be putting themselves at a significantly greater risk, because car crashes are so much more common than airplane incidents, whether it’s a crash or turbulence,”

[xref]

that analysis they did sounds kind of silly, since at 2 years and 1 day you’re paying full boat anyway.

The logical conclusion of their assessment: at 2y1d people can afford the fare so fly but 2 days before that they couldn’t so would drive instead? The argument doesn’t actually bear weight.

[kshacker]

Such arbitrary decisions are part of our day to day life. This is not new.

You can vote at 18. Why not 19, why not 18.1? You can drink at 21, why not 18, why not 20.5? When buying tickets, there are tickets for children and senior. When buying food, there is senior discount - in some places it is for age 55, some places for 60, well actually the numbers could be anything from 50-67 (starting age).

We draw such arbitrary boundaries every day. They could be based on statistics, or marketing, but they are part of life.

For airlines, I presume at some age, the weight/space taken starts becoming a factor, so they likely picked 2 year as a boundary in this case.

[xref]

I agree with all that. But I still think if they move the free passenger bar from 2y to 0y it will be an undetectable change in the number of flights booked