Avalanche survival using airbag backpack
Get full access to Outside Learn, our online education hub featuring in-depth fitness, nutrition, and adventure courses and more than 2,000 instructional videos when you sign up for Outside+.
A skier in Alaska survived this avalanche using a Backcountry Access Float 30 avalanche airbag backpack. Airbag backpacks, tested with much success in Europe, allow a skier or snowboarder to deploy airbags from the pack using compressed air, thus decreasing their density and keeping them atop the snowpack in a slide. You can see the shadows and edges of the orange airbags in this helmet cam. This skier ended up on top of the debris, feet downhill.
–Christopher Van Tilburg, MD
