Very good Avy airbag article.

The Tunnel Creek accident was what convinced (me) to buy them....maybe its just coincidental how the lone airbag pack skier survived that incident, but that was enough for us to decide to buy them for this season.

Ditto on the above.

I bought a BCA FLoat 22 and went with the smaller pack because I mostly ski lift-serve and side country when it's powder season, plus all my ski touring gear for day trips easily fits in this pack.

Purchased from Pro Ski and Guiding in North Bend. They have the compressed air and will fill it there for free if you buy your pack and canister there. I've deployed mine twice to test it and it's convenient to go in there and get it refilled.

Thanks for posting this article. I picked up the Mammut from Pro Guiding at the beginning of this season. At first I cringed at the thought of spending $1,000 on the pack until I realized that I already spend $300/month on life insurance, so why wouldn't I buy the pack to increase my statistical odds? It seems like a small price to pay in the grand scale of things, to do what we love with an additonal margin of life protection. I agree with all of the comments regarding terrain selection first, and so forth. The very last thing I ever want to do is see if the bag actually works. My hope is that at the end of my ski career I look back and say, "well, that was a big waste of money because I never used it."

My hope is that at the end of my ski career I look back and say, "well, that was a big waste of money because I never used it."

Well said.

"Bottom Line:
Ignore the 97% number and the 3% number.  My best guess is that avalanche airbag packs will probably save a little more than half of those who would have otherwise have died in an avalanche."

Good enough for me.

Definitely a very good article, agreed for sure.
And his bottomline conclusion fit within the range of the more detailed data analysis I conducted (although the super-detailed Canadian data set wasn't available for me yet this past spring):
beaconreviews.com/transceivers/pdfs/Airb....Shefftz.TAR30.4.pdf

But I was disappointed by his qualitative references to automotive safety.
My quantitative segue into improvements in auto safety has many qualifications, but the bottomline is:
"Out of all 36,339 automobile deaths in 1965, the 2009 survival rate would have saved 28,171 lives."
We should be so unfortunate to see such a disappointing result in avy safety!