Big Air, Big Airbags

For the uninitiated, snowboarding is all about freestyle moves, being 10 feet or more off the ground, whether that comes about through soaring out of the halfpipe or hurling one’s self off a kicker, or ramp.

There’s certainly more to snowboarding than that, such as riding on groomed slopes, in powder, or in other ways that generally involved keeping some part of the board on the ground.

Still, the possibility of getting “big air” makes for a good story, as Sean Newsom wrote last year in the Times of London. His article was called Leaping the Fear Barrier.”

In the article, Newsom writes about jumping off a ramp onto a couple of giant air bags, which absorb the impact of poorly executed jumps–in other words, jumps such as he was likely to perform.

First, he describes the airbags:

I could only hope that the socking great airbag on the other side of the jump would stop my fall. This giant inflatable cushion is becoming a regular fixture in the UK’s “real snow” centres (which use man-made snow, very close to the real thing). The airbag contains two air-filled chambers. The first, lower chamber is similar to a bouncy castle. The second, top layer is softer, full of blown air, and is designed to soak up the impact of the fall rather than provide any bounce.

Then he calculates what will happen, and makes the jump.

A split second later, I was down on the airbag. It was an extraordinary feeling. There was almost no sense of impact. It soaked up the full force of my fall, and left me lying in the middle of an enormous and rather gorgeous pillow, quivering with laughter and relief. My system hasn’t been so flooded with adrenaline since the time I first learnt to ride a snowboard.

It’s almost enough to make me think of trying out something like that.