When you climb into the average general aviation aircraft – or at least, the ones that I’ve been flying – the first thing you’re reminded of is how old they are.
It’s not at all uncommon to see aircraft in flying clubs that we’re new when your host was a teenager, and the interiors – apart from the six pack instrument stack – remind him of nothing so much as the 1969 Dodge Dart Demon he used to pitch teenage woo with while frightening pedestrians on the sidewalk.
Automobile seatbelts today usually come with integrated lap and shoulder straps but in vintage Cessnas – just like in that old Demon – the shoulder strap optionally attaches to the lap belts, stowing away in a sheath above the pilot and passenger doors when not in use. When combined with a certain weight-conscious fragility built into aircraft designs, the result seems to be an inordinate number of unsurvivable crashes even at relatively moderate speeds in the landing and take-off phases of flight.
Along comes someone with a better idea;
Just as airbags have vastly improved automotive safety in the last 15 years, the technology is moving into general aviation with some very encouraging early results. So far, manufacturer AmSafe counts 11 lives saved by airbags, and that number is likely to grow as the number of airbags in the GA fleet increases.
“Airbags are going to become as common in the GA fleet as they are in cars,” said Bill Hagan, president of AmSafe’s aviation division. “The extent to which airbags improve aviation safety is huge. Airbags can absolutely prevent death or serious injury in a broad variety of aviation accidents.”
AmSafe doesn’t quantify the speed or descent rates at which airbags can make aircraft accidents survivable. But Hagan said airbags have been shown to save lives and lessen the severity of injuries across a broad spectrum of takeoff and landing accidents, as well as forced landings in which pilots maintain control of their aircraft to the ground.
In one case, a student and instructor practicing night touch-and-go landings in an airbag-equipped Cessna 172 lost their bearings and flew into a heavily forested area at normal approach speed. Both walked away from the accident with minor injuries. Another event involved a botched go-around in a Cirrus SR22 in which the airplane cartwheeled and was completely destroyed—yet both occupants survived.
These aren’t designed to save a pilot who spins in from an approach turn stall at 300 feet, but they may well save a number of folks who either botch a landing or are forced down due to a loss of power over unwelcoming terrain.
The designer even claims that seatbelt-mounted airbags are superior to the dashboard mounted designs, since they deploy away from the wearer rather than blowing up in his face.
Good stuff.
Great ideas. Notice that it came from some guy / company working on their own withuot directives from Uncle Sam and, probably in spite of nanny government and the meddlers who make business and innovation more difficult and less likely.
But wait and see what happens when someone using this very smart idea does not survive or does with big injuries and the Democrats’ good friends the trial lawyers get in the face of the inventors. Congress will step in to make litigation more likely, and mandate changes that will make the product far more costly. Real problems in real life.
In a way this story can be used as a metaphor for life itself. Just think of all the things that should be intuitively obvious to people with even a nodding acquaintance with a given industry, technology, business practice, etc., but which go long un-addressed until someone comes along and says, in effect, that the Emperor has no clothes, and that the standard ways of doing things will no longer suffice. Stories such as this only point out how truly rare is truly innovative thinking, and why it never can hurt to let people with fresh eyes with no vested interest in the status quo have a look at any given problem.
Items such as this again cause me to harken back to the WWII Dolittle raid on Japan and point out the fact that the idea/concept did not waft up from the bowels of the carrier operators or from bomber pilots like Dolittle himself, but was the brainchild of a submariner with no foot in either camp, unfettered by attachment to doctrinal straight-jackets to innovative thinking or cross-service rivalries
about air operations as say, in this case, between Navy and AAF air doctrine and SOPs.
(OTOH, maybe our bubble-head in this case was just basically smarter than everybody else.
)
How do they deal with turbulences ?
DNM:
The seats are equipped with sensors that sense rapid onset lateral g-forces, e.g. smacking into something abruptly; unlike turbulence which has a significant vertical component. To my knowledge, at least in the Cirrus community, no one has had the AmSafe bags deploy in turbulence. In fact that have not deployed in a couple of parachute landings because the g-forces were virtually all vertical and not horizontal in nature.
VR,
Comjam
Greetings:
Didn’t those Dodge Dart’s have push button transmissions? Chrysler technology leading the way.
Ha! Those PB trannies were pretty cool.
Ron,11B40/
They were WAY cool. My Dad had a 1961 Dodge Polara 500 2-dr hard-top with the huge hemi engine and 4bbl carb with posi-traction rear end. In the Polara the button console was a small grouping in an extended oval that protruded from the dash just to the LEFT of the steering wheel. The linkage was lightning fast and lots of the the cheaper models like the Dart were used for drag racing and were actually faster than standard shifts. Ours drove like a bat out of hell with that huge engine (can’t remember HOW big now, but was largest that didn’t require a breather scoop on hood.) but was the luxury model w. leather seats, ac, a “reverberator” (didn’t have stereo in those days.) enhanced simulated stereo-sound radio–the works. (Creme/Tan exterior w. chocolate trim w. creme/tan & chocolate trim seats.) Was a delight to drive on long trips.
Maybe they could ‘test’ it out by putting airbags on the CVR and FDR…. meanwhile, I expect Sirus is going to get lots of face time in federal courts if they are giving out airbags with their planes that enable the unwary unrated and unsober to depart for the undiscovered country without a flight plan on file and university degree in aeronautics and aerospace medicine.
They are actually not too uncomfortable to wear… for short periods of time. They are tolerable for the longer cross-country flights. During summer time/hot weather, they are not comfortable. The ones that I’ve worn have been in the SR20/22. As long as the shoulder harness buckle is positioned correctly, i.e. over one’s belt buckle, the airbags are centered vertically on the torso. If one allows the shoulder harness to ride up, then the airbags – which look like rather stiff shoulder harnesses – tend to stick up and get in the way. I agree with Comjam – they are designed for accelerations on the longituninal axis and vertical accelerations – turbulence, parachute landing for Cirrus pilots, etc – will have no effect on the airbags. As far as I recall, the sensor is mounted in the belly in the SR series.
It will be a hit with the same folks who retrofit a ballastic recovery system to a plane. It might make the uneasy rider a better passenger. A lot better than just the inertial lock up devices. I like it.
The first auto seatbelt I ever wore was in a home-built sportscar from California named the Comet, and it was in the 1950s when Gen. Curtis LeMay used to let the SCCA race on his airbases. At that point, cars didn’t have seatbelts, so the shade tree mechanics among the sports car drivers, who were risking life and limb at high speeds, decided to take aircraft seat belts and install them in sports cars. The first one I saw was very wide webbing and had no shoulder belt attached. My driver had two installed, one on the driver’s seat, and one on the passenger seat next to him, which he kept tightly cinched, so that if the car rolled, he could duck to the right and hook his arm under the belt, to keep himself in the cockpit and held mostly flat.
Every sportscar rollover I ever witnessed and photographed showed the driver with his right arm straight up, trying to hold the car off the pavement — an instinctive, natural and dumb thing to do, so Glenn tried to prevent this from happening. Pretty soon, most race cars had belts, and then, later, roll bars [for those guys who just had to try to hold the car up off the pavement when it rolled.]
Ahh, memories. Just thought you might enjoy them, you speed demons.
Marianne
How much wieght do the airbags take away from your useful load? I fly out a a 2000′ runway with a bank at one end and trees at the other. I’m not a small guy, so if I carry a pax I already end up leaving fuel behind.
Shoulder belts? You must be driving those newer Cessnas Lex! No such thing in our ‘67 Hawk, not yet at least.
Gotta scrounge up some dough for B.A.S. harnesses.