Kitzbuhel avalanche: the ultimate airbag test

We don’t normally make a habit of promoting our competitors, but in this case, they deserve huge credit. At a recent gathering of outdoor retailers in Stockholm, Sweden, organizer Bengt Klingheim (Swedish distributor of both BCA and ABS airbags) invited a local avalanche survivor to recount her miraculous recovery last year in Austria. The incident is one more piece of very convincing evidence that avalanche airbags truly work. The guest speaker, 30-year-old Stina Sletterström, was caught in an avalanche while skiing off-piste near Kitzbuhel Austria in February of 2010. Unfortunately, her presentation was in Swedish, so I didn’t get much out of it–although, like most American males in Sweden, I was happy to be a simple voyeur. Anyway, she was skiing with Daniel Buss, 35, who at the time was on holiday from his IT job in Munich. I had the pleasure of having dinner last month with Buss at the annual meeting of the International Commission on Alpine Rescue (ICAR) in Are, Sweden. He retold the story from his perspective: The two were both caught in the avalanche at about 3:00 pm. Buss said it measured 60 meters wide by 300 meters long, with a 0.5 meter crown. “I’d skied this shot more than a hundred times before and I was sure it wasn’t going to slide,” he said. “Then I was sure it would stop, but it didn’t.” When it finally did come to rest, Buss was on top; he had deployed his ABS airbag. Slettrström, however, had disappeared immediately. Only after working to free himself from the debris–and striking a ski–did Buss discover that his friend was buried right next to him, but she was 1.5 meters deep. She was unconscious when he got to her airway six minutes later, but he revived her at the scene. In this case, the person with the airbag stayed on top and the person without one didn’t. ”If you wanted to design a test to evaluate airbags, this would be the perfect test,” he told me. The evidence was so convincing, in fact, that Buss has since taken a job as sales manager at ABS Airbag Systems, our (friendly) German competitor. As for Stina, she said she was “pulled under immediately” (according to Klingheim’s translation) and went unconscious quickly enough that she doesn’t remember anything about the rescue. “All I remember was passing out and dreaming about powder skiing on a sunny day. I was pissed when Daniel woke me up and told me I’d just been buried in an avalanche.”