[jettgirl]

neil_gardner: i am a jetstar flight attendant and am appalled that you were in that situation with the infant car seat on one of our flights. Unfortunatley, without bringing down my collegues too much (we are actually quite smart hehe) there are always some people in every job who do not know what they are doing, that crewmember you dealt with was obviously not the brightest crayon in the box. New Crew are trained extensively in every facet of aircraft safety, standard operating procedures and emergency training. They all practice, one on one in ground school in fitting a childs car seat and i clearly remember it being drilled into me many times about blocking exits or impeding the path of passengers with objects, one of them being a child seat. it really is commonsense.
I am glad that there are people like you out there flying who have the commonsense to think of such things as being blocked in an evacuation etc, most people dont - and it really is genuinely nice to have such passengers onboard. Any crew i fly with would most certainly of picked up the issue immediatly and fitted the car seat to the Alpha seat. The Car seat could even of been fit to any other window seat, providing the person sitting behind them didnt mind not having an unuseable tray table.. keep this in mind in the future, as if you are travelling in a group and someone was willing to sit in the seat behind, it is completley possible for someone to occupy the seat directly behind a fitted carseat, it would just be the tray table that didnt work - the car seat attachments sort of attach to the side of the legs of the chair so there wouldnt be any other legroom problems really at all.
Our procedures in this matter are in line with the entire Qantas Group procedures, i am not sure about Virgin's Policy, but i have lots of friends who fly with them as crew and will find out - most likely it is to enable a quicker turnaround on the ground, as fitting child seats require the pax to preboard and be fitted, plus, as someone else mentioned, the seat has to be approved to a certain standard at check in and again by the crew.
I myself dont have children but i would definately purchase a seat for them and provide my own approved car seat, statistics have proven that infant belts probably only protect the infant from turbulence and stop them from flying forward, but the adults weight could easily crush them, and if the belt isnt secure enough, they would probably fly out the top or through the bottom anyway.
Obviously having the Trainer/Checker onboard was a godsend, and she probably put the fear of god into that flight attendant for making such a stupid mistake, however bringing it to the company's attention wouldnt be a bad thing, as it will only result in more emphasis being put on issues such as this and ensuring that crew are aware of procedure before being 'checked' and coming out online in the cabin and operating as a flight attendant.