Snowboarder Deploys Avalanche Bag Mid Air
Avalanche airbags are considered an effective, if expensive, avalanche safety tool.
Professional snowboarder Thomas Feuerstein was concerned with another potential performance metric of the avalanche airbag: Could it help you fly?
These are his results.
Okay, okay, surprising no one; an avalanche airbag isn't going to help you get more airtime.
In a less surprising twist, though, they will help you stay safer from an avalanche.
How much safer, exactly? That's still something of an open question. Gathering concrete data on the effectiveness of avalanche tools like airbags is complicated as many backcountry incidents, particularly those where no one gets hurt or dies, go unreported in an official capacity.
The closest thing to a definitive answer I found came from two potentially outdated sources.
First is a research paper published in the scientific journal Resuscitation in 2014 titled "The effectiveness of avalanche airbags." This paper states that inflated airbags reduce mortality by 50%. Here's why: According to the researchers, in avalanches where the victim is wearing an inflated airbag, the mortality rate is 11%. If they aren't wearing an inflated airbag, the mortality rate is 22%.
The second source I came across was a blog post from avalanche educator Bruce Tremper, which, funnily enough, was about the paper published in Resuscitation. Tremper's blog post didn't have a date on it, but the comments were shared in 2016, so it was probably also published in 2016.
That's all to say that there isn't loads of contemporary research on avalanche airbags, surprise, surprise.
I've noticed that the 22% to 11% number cropped up in articles as recently as this year, though, so it seems that the accepted industry answer regarding airbags for now is this: they reduce mortality by 50%.
Related: Vail Resorts' Wisconsin Ski Area Gives Candid Conditions Report
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