Putting Air Bags in the Air
Airlines Turn to Automobile Technology
To Meet Looming FAA Seat-Safety Regulations
By ANDY PASZTOR (Wall Street Journal)
Thursday, November 16, 2006
With tougher safety
standards for airplane cabins looming on the horizon,
the aviation industry is turning to a tried-and-true
technology from the family car: air bags.
Built into specially equipped seatbelts, these air bags
explode outward in the event of a sudden impact,
cushioning passengers from smacking their heads or
torsos against seat dividers, bulkheads, galleys,
lavatories and other potentially hazardous obstructions.
Just as in a car, sensors would activate the bags within
milliseconds of impact. Because the air bags expand away
from occupants, proponents say, there is less likelihood
of injuries from the explosive force of the bag opening
than in an auto. They are approved for use by children
as young as 2 years old.
The air bags, which are already used in thousands of
small planes, aren't intended for use on every seat on a
jetliner. They're designed for seats in which passengers
are at the greatest risk during a survivable crash --
the small percentage of seats nearest potentially
hazardous obstructions or those that turn into lie-flat
beds and are angled to face aisles.
The impetus for air bags comes from research
that determined that in many airline crashes, the actual
impact was survivable. After more than 15 years of debate
and resistance from airlines, the Federal Aviation
Administration ruled that by November 2009 certain seats on
existing airliners must be upgraded and all new planes must
be equipped with more crash-resistant seats throughout.
Those regulations include the toughened safety requirements
for angled seats and those near obstructions. According to
previous FAA-sponsored research, stronger seats and better
restraints could have averted 45 fatalities and 40 serious
injuries of airline passengers between 1984 and 1998.
While there are other alternatives -- such as cumbersome
shoulder harnesses -- to meet the FAA guidelines, air bags
are increasingly finding favor with airlines and
manufacturers.
"We've long understood the benefits of air bags in
vehicles," says John Goglia, a former member of the National
Transportation Safety Board who participated in
industry-government studies about aviation applications.
"Now, we finally have the chance to see how well they work
on airplanes."
Foreign carriers including Virgin Atlantic, Air
Canada and Air New Zealand already have adopted air bags,
which cost about $2,000 per seat, for use on the riskiest
seats. Delta Air Lines is set in early 2008 to become the
first major U.S. carrier to embrace air bags when it
installs new premium business-class arrangements with angled
seats that recline into fully horizontal cots.
The air bags will appear first on Delta's newest Boeing
777s, but they eventually will be standard on Business Elite
sections on Delta's entire fleet of 77 long-range aircraft,
including Boeing
767s. The changeover should be completed by 2010.
AmSafe Aviation -- which makes the only approved air-bag
seatbelts and is the leading maker of aviation lapbelts --
estimates that air bags will eventually be in use on about
5% of the seats on all new jetliners.
"It's an excellent idea and a great safety benefit for
passengers," says David Stempler, president of the Air
Travelers Association, a passenger advocacy group. He said
it "failed to gain traction in the past" largely due to the
weak financial condition of U.S. airlines.
Some industry officials see the use of air bags increasing
dramatically by the end of the decade, perhaps climbing to
100,000 seats from about 6,000 now installed on airlines
around the globe. "Regulators are less and less willing to
give anyone more slack" by delaying compliance, says Bill
Hagan, executive vice president of AmSafe. The Phoenix
company has so far gotten approval for its inflatable bags
to be used on 11 commercial aircraft models.
Air bags are likely to gain converts as other U.S. and
foreign carriers switch to similar lie-flat options for
passengers. Because they're not perpendicular to the aisle,
those seats put passengers at awkward angles that make them
more susceptible to serious injury during a crash. Already,
some manufacturers only sell lie-flat seats that are
equipped with air bags.
There are alternate ways to meet the new standards, but all
have disadvantages. One option is to require first- and
business-class passengers to strap themselves in with
unwieldy lap-and-shoulder harnesses such as those used by
flight attendants and pilots during takeoffs and landings.
Another is to leave more room between seats and move them
far enough back from bulkheads to avoid head trauma. But
that would effectively reduce the number of seats --
especially the lucrative premium ones -- on each flight,
sacrificing millions of dollars in potential annual revenue
per plane.
With air bags, the most noticeable difference for passengers
is that the lapbelt is about three-quarters of an inch
thick. The rest of the system, including sensors and
canisters of compressed helium gas, are out of sight.
In approving the use of air bags on some Boeing 777 seats,
the FAA warned that airlines need to be mindful of the fact
that air bags in planes were being used in an environment
"quite different than automobiles." Subjected to greater
wear and tear than a car because of how many hours a plane
is operated each day, the agency said special care also had
to be taken to make sure that electromagnetic fields didn't
affect the system that activates an airliner's air bags.
Beyond jetliners, manufacturers of small planes are
installing air bags on nearly 80% of current production --
just as a flood of new, higher-performance planes is about
to hit the market. The FAA has made it unusually easy to put
them on private aircraft already in service, by adopting a
blanket regulation allowing installation in scores of
different models of general-aviation planes. Such retrofits
are projected to reach record levels in the next few years.
For the first time, AmSafe claims, investigators have
documented that air bags prevented fatalities when three
propeller-driven aircraft went down in separate accidents
this summer. The pilot of a single-engine Cirrus plane that
crashed in mountainous terrain in Switzerland in early July,
for example, escaped serious injury when his air bag
deployed. When another Cirrus crashed a month later in
Wisconsin -- sending the plane cartwheeling across a soybean
field -- all three people on board survived.
