Front airbags don’t inflate in hundreds of head-on crashes

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He said the newspaper’s findings point NHTSA “to an area that warrants investigation to see if there is an opportunity to improve safety.”

In its database analysis, The Star eliminated thousands of fatalities in an attempt to produce as conservative a finding as possible. The newspaper’s analysis focused on head-on crashes into the front ends of other vehicles and objects such as trees and embankments.

If the newspaper includes front-end crashes into the side or rear of other vehicles — the type of crash that killed Brooke Katz — the number of deaths climbs to 1,900.

The Star also did not include fatal crashes identified in the database that involved principal impacts to the left or right fenders. Nor did it include victims who were ejected or died when their vehicles rolled over, crashed and caught fire or were submerged in water. And the newspaper excluded victims in vehicle models where airbags were not standard equipment.

Those steps eliminated at least 3,000 fatalities.

Finally, the newspaper consulted with automotive safety researchers, statisticians and other experts — including former NHTSA officials — in formulating its methodology for the analysis. All found it acceptable. And the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in Columbia, Mo., examined the same database and confirmed The Star’s numbers.

Moreover, the NHTSA database reveals that the annual number of deaths in nondeployment crashes grew dramatically — about 50 percent — since 2001. In 2006 alone, the deaths rose by 14 percent from the previous year — despite a 2 percent drop in all traffic fatalities.

NHTSA declined to make top agency officials available for interviews.

Although its spokesman discounted The Star’s findings, he added that 1,400 deaths, if true, were not that alarming.

“If it’s a real number, it’s not a surprise to us,” Tyson said.

Indeed, the problem of noninflating front airbags cannot come as a surprise to NHTSA officials. In complaints filed with NHTSA by the public following injury and fatal accidents, uninflated airbags outranked any other complaint about components. In fact, The Star found that nondeployments represented nearly one-fourth of the thousands of gripes lodged with the agency over severe accidents.

A former NHTSA official said the analysis raises serious questions. After reviewing NHTSA crash records at the newspaper’s request, George Washington University engineering professor Kennerly Digges said, “You see things here that can cause you a lot of worry.”

Especially in a “terrible crash … you don’t understand why you didn’t get a deployment,” said Digges, a former NHTSA director of vehicle safety research.

Claybrook, who led NHTSA during the Carter administration, said the agency and Congress needed to investigate the nondeployment problem.

Problems in most models

The analysis of NHTSA fatality data showed that airbags didn’t deploy in virtually every make of auto that Americans drive, both foreign and domestic. And the nondeployments ranged from aging models to new cars fresh off the lot.

For instance, at least 100 drivers and front-seat passengers died while traveling in model-year vehicles 2004 through 2006. They included Hilton Thompson and Pansy Evans, elderly siblings from southeast Missouri. They died in 2004 in a Cadillac that Thompson had bought new just the day before.

GM declined to comment on that accident or any other specific crash.

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