The almost unbelievable success story of what is probably the most popular piece of avalanche emergency equipment today began 30 years ago: the avalanche airbag. This story is inextricably linked to the Bavarian engineer Peter Aschauer, who fought for his idea against many odds for a long time. And the result was nothing less than a (small) revolution: the avalanche airbag is now virtually standard equipment for countless winter sports enthusiasts. The idea for the avalanche airbag is based on a rather accidental discovery ...
Incredible, but true: a forester or hunter shot several chamois in the high mountains and skied down into the valley with the dead animals on his shoulders, triggering a snow slab. He soon realized that the animals' bodies seemed to help him stay on the surface. After some tests with large-volume plastic canisters, the forester finally applied for a patent. This was the birth of the idea of the avalanche airbag.
A few years later, engineer Peter Aschauer acquired this patent and founded the company ABS Peter Aschauer GmbH. A few years passed before his company finally presented the first avalanche airbag backpack at ISPO 1985. This was a
A system that used a cable to trigger a compressed air cartridge, which then inflated the airbag. At the time, this was still a mono airbag system that was attached directly to the body or alternatively to the backpack and was quite heavy at four kilograms. However, the ABS backpack hardly sold at first. It was not until the end of the 1980s that Peter Aschauer's young airbag company was able to record its first successes. The Summit Club (= professional mountaineering school) of the German Alpine Club made the backpacks compulsory for all participants in their "Ski Plus Weeks". Other organizers and many mountain and ski schools followed suit.
The 1990s were by far the most important and formative years in the history of the ABS backpack. In 1995, the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) tested the function of avalanche airbags in several trials. Thanks to the results obtained, more and more new developments were gradually introduced, such as pyrotechnic-pneumatic deployment and the double airbag, which is still the basic principle of ABS today. In the meantime, the airbag backpack has almost become part of the standard emergency equipment for many deep snow fans and since 2011 there have also been cooperations with other manufacturers. Ortovox and Salewa, for example, integrate the ABS system into their backpacks (so-called Inside Partner), while other manufacturers such as Evoc and Osprey take a different approach. They produce zip-ons (clip-on backpack attachments) for the ABS base units (so-called compatible partners).
Competition
To mark the 30th anniversary, all customers who purchase an ABS avalanche airbag between March 1 and May 31, 2015 have the opportunity to win back the purchase price. All you have to do is upload the scanned receipt to the ABS website. Every 30th participant wins!
