I just took my 16-month-old, 22-pound daughter on a plane trip with this seat and the whole trip was MUCH smoother than a previous trip on which I had taken her regular car seat. After a little practice it is pretty easy to convert from a stroller to a car seat and back while the baby is sitting it it, which is a lifesaver for the godawful painful process of getting through security. I could leave her strapped in the stroller until I had all my various items unpacked and on the belt, convert it to a seat, set it up and on the table, take her out, then slide the seat through with one hand; much better than having to hang on to her with one hand while I try to collapse and hoist a regular stroller onto the belt with the other. It steers very easily with one hand, and although it has hardly any basket, the accessory sack that you can buy separately is very roomy, handy, and lightweight, simple to stuff into a small suitcase. The stroller even rolled (snugly) down the Economy class aisles of both Airbus A320 and Boeing 757 planes. Once at our destination, it was a piece of cake to collapse the stroller and toss her into a taxi, strapping her in safely. This stroller is a must if your travel includes much time spent in taxis.
There were, however, three serious drawbacks which prevent me from giving it 5 stars.
- The telescoping handle is somewhat floppily connected to the body of the stroller. This is apparently supposed to be a "feature" as it is prominently labeled "FLEX-STEER (TM)" but the floppiness means -- as the owner's manual tells you -- that in order to get the stroller over an obstruction like a street curb, you cannot do the normal operation of leaning down on the handle to pop up the front wheels and lift them over the curb. Instead, you are instructed to turn the stroller around backward, lift up on the handle to lift the back wheels over the curb, then turn around and proceed. At least once on my trip I found myself crossing a street, and a car turned onto the street and started barreling toward me and I had to try to do this operation in a real hurry. Also both planes I traveled on had large gaps between the plane deck and the jetbridge; there's no room for turning the stroller around in that situation, the only option is to bodily lift the seat and baby with both hands and set it on to the deck.
- As other reviewers have noted, to convert it from stroller to seat and back you have to lift both baby and stroller into the air. This is not a huge deal, but every dang time I collapsed or reset the stroller, some protruding piece of plastic on the back of it created a new bruise on my right arm. By the end of the trip my arm looked like leopardskin, peppered with purple bruises. Good thing I wasn't expected to look pretty.
- When the seat is in the forward-facing position, the seatbelt crosses the front of the seat in a position that is pretty high up the seat. For my 16-month-old, the belt crossed the seat at mid-chest level, pinning her upper arms. If she were a thumbsucker, this would have been utterly unworkable. As it was, I couldn't keep the seatbelt on for the whole flight; she wouldn't have stood for it. Once she has grown a couple more inches, her shoulders will be far enough above the seat belt position that her arms will be able to lie comfortably over the seat belt, but until then, strapping her in to the plane or car is equivalent to strapping her arms to her sides. At least in a plane you get to unbuckle the seat belt occasionally; this seat will not work for her in a car until she grows more.
One other random "pro" to mention: I discovered while hanging around in the airport that, with the wheels deployed but the handle in its stored position, the Sit'n'Stroll has a sixth function, as a walker -- my daughter pushed it up and down and up and down and up and down the concourse (to the annoyance, I am sure, of many harried travelers), getting those little legs nice and tired out for the flight.