As aviation learned from the automotive world, airbags that deploy within milliseconds of the beginning of an impact event and keep the occupant from slamming into the panel have saved countless lives. The initial challenge for the aircraft world was where to store the airbags and how to deploy them. I looked at records and spoke with engineers at one of the airframe manufacturers regarding their airbag work in the 1970s.
The overriding problem was how to avoid having the airbag impact the flight control system, causing potential loss of control during an inadvertent deployment as we’ll as to make sure that a deployment during an impact sequence didn’t cause a flight control input that made matters worse. At the time, the only places to put the airbags were in the instrument panel or control yoke, and even in an aircraft with a stick rather than a yoke, deployment did bad things with the flight controls.