Former Auto Exec Gives Flight to Air Bags

Engineer Uses His Car-Safety Background to Tackle an Aviation Dilemma

Full name: Bill Hagan
Age: 50
Hometown: Dayton, Ohio
Current position: President, AmSafe Aviation
First job: Pressman
Favorite job: This one
Education: B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, University of Dayton
Years in the industry: 15 years in aerospace
How I got to here in 10 words or less: I was focused and persistent.

Bill Hagan faced a unique engineering problem when he took a job at AmSafe, a company specializing in airplane and automotive restraints. Now division president of AmSafe Aviation, he had to come up with a way to protect seated aircraft passengers from crash impacts of up to 16 times the force of gravity. Certain seats that faced hard walls or were in exit rows wouldn't meet the Federal Aviation Administration's new 16-G safety standard, scheduled to take effect this month.

So the former General Motors engineer borrowed automotive technology to develop air bags built into the lap belt. The idea has already saved lives. Edited excerpts follow.

Q: What attracted you to mechanical engineering?

A: My father had been an aerospace engineer in the 1950s and 1960s. And I had always been a technically, mechanically astute person myself.

AmSafe

Bill Hagan developed an aircraft air bag to meet new safety standards.

Q: How did you get your start at GM?

A: I enrolled in a co-op work program [while at the University of Dayton]. I went to school for a semester and worked at GM for a semester. And I went to school at night while working on my co-op assignments and during the summers [to graduate sooner because] I started college at 26. Each semester I got put into different roles and different departments. It gave me the opportunity to see a lot of different dimensions of the company.

Q: You actually became a project manager for Buick Roadmaster instrument panels before graduating. How did you convince your boss to give a student so much responsibility?

A: It was that kind of work climate at the time [1988] and they had enough projects flowing in, that if you were a capable person that could do the work, you would get as much responsibility as you could handle. Plus, I wasn't just a green kid. I was 28 years old and had worked in the family printing business since I was 16. I was managing 12 employees and had a mortgage and two kids before I started college.

Q: At what point did you start working on automotive safety products?

A: When engineering a dashboard, one of the big things you work with is crashworthiness. I learned how occupants interact with seat belts and how they articulate and move into the dashboard. After being promoted to senior project engineer, I ran the 1995 C/K truck dash panel project—that's the large GM truck platform like the Suburban and Tahoe.

I eventually got sent to Mesa, Ariz., to be the on-site engineer at the TRW [automotive and aerospace company] air-bag facility.

I oversaw all of the product engineering and air-bag production there for GM platforms.

Q: Why did you leave GM?

A: In 1994, my boss wanted me to move to Detroit. I talked to my wife, and we really liked Phoenix. I ended up resigning and taking a job as an operations manager at AmSafe in Phoenix. At the time it was a $12 million company that sold aviation restraints and some niche automotive restraints.

Q: It didn't take you long to rise through the ranks. How did you climb the ladder?

A: In 1999, AmSafe acquired a company called Bridport, a maker of cargo nets. They were almost as big as AmSafe Aviation. As the company continued to grow, [the company was] reorganized into three major divisions. And I was made president of AmSafe Aviation the following year.

How You Can Get There,Too

Best advice: Don't be afraid to change and take on a new challenge.

Where you should start: "I'm a huge fan of co-op programs. It's good for industry and for the student," says Mr. Hagan.

Professional organizations to contact: PSAE International (sae.org); Aerospace Industries Association (aia-aerospace.org); American Society of Mechanical Engineers (asme.org).

Salary range: According to the Department of Labor, the median wage for aerospace engineers in 2008 was $92,520 with the top earners being paid $134,570 and above.

Q: Why make airplane air bags?

A: The FAA passed new minimum safety standard in the late 1980s that stated that seats in newly designed planes had to be dynamically certified, demonstrating that occupants would sustain no injury during a crash event.

The industry didn't have any good way to comply with the rule for seats facing bulkheads, galleys and exit rows. There's no friendly, engineered surface to run into. The alternative is to move those seats back away from the strike surface, which amounts to taking seats out of the aircraft. That's a lot of lost revenue.

Q: Were the engineering challenges different than automotive air bags?

A: 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, which translates to added weight and cost.

Q: Was it a hard sell?

A: The air bag [which costs $1,250 each] was slow to sell at first. We had to educate everybody and prove we could make technology that worked well. The first fielded in-flight service of our product was in 2001. We installed them in the entire world-wide fleet of British Aerospace J41 aircraft [a medium-sized turboprop commuter plane].

The big turning point is when Airbus made our air bag a standard option on the A340-600. We've since installed 45,000 units in aircraft world-wide [27,600 for general aviation planes and 17,900 in private aircraft]. They're now used in everything from small single-engine planes to the major carriers like Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific.

Q: Have lap belt air bags saved any lives?

A: Last Thanksgiving, there was an incident in Groton, Conn. A student and his instructor were flying in a Cessna 172 single-engine plane. They were practicing night takeoff and landings. On their last approach, the student mis-navigated and flew full speed into some trees. The air bags saved them. They were able to walk away, though the instructor had to have a few stitches.

Write to Dennis Nishi at cjeditor@dowjones.com

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