Were the engineering challenges different than automotive air bags?
At first we considered putting the air bag into the wall in front of you, much like it would deploy in a car. Re-engineering that to work in different aircraft proved too expensive. I had seen early patent sketches of seat-belt air bags from the 1960s and a video from a company that was trying to develop an inflatable shoulder strap for the back seat of cars. That didn’t really go anywhere for them. That’s when I thought of applying that idea to lap belts. It solved all the problems. We now have a standard product that can be installed into every seat, including retrofitting older planes. Q. Is there a reason you can’t use shoulder belts like they do in cars? A. The real reason you cannot use them is the floor structure of the aircraft cannot handle the increased loads that shoulder belts impart. You have something like 2.5 to 3 times the load being transferred to the floor structure. The seat would never stay attached to the floor, without a lot of added strength in the seat and floor
