Not many people realise that the concept of airbags – a soft shock absorber to land against in a smash – has been around for over sixty years. The very first patent on an inflatable crash-landing device for airplanes was registered during World War II. In the 1980s, the very first commercial airbags appeared in motorcars.

Up to the present day, stats indicate that airbags reduce the chance of death in a straight head-on crash by about thirty percent. Nowadays we also have door-mounted side and seat-mounted airbags. In point of fact, some cars go way beyond merely having dual air bags, and alternatively have six to eight air bags.

An airbag’s job is to slow the forward motion of the driver in just a split second. An air bag can achieve this job in three steps:

• The airbag itself is made of a thin, nylon, which is compressed inside the dashboard or steering wheel and, more recently, the door or seat
• The sensor is the device that tells the airbag to inflate. Expansion occurs when there’s a collision force equating to driving into a brick wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A switch is flipped when there is a weight movement that cuts off an electric contact, telling the detectors that a crash has happened. The sensors receive data from an accelerometer built into a microchip
• The airbag’s expansion system fuses sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to produce nitrogen gas. Hot blasts of the nitrogen inflate the airbag

Because of the very fast inflation of an air bag, it’s a safety requirement that the driver and passenger sit in an upright position providing a reasonable space between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel – this sets aside time for the airbag to balloon while the driver/passenger are being pushed forward by the impact of the crash.

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