Behind the Aerobag: How Picnic–PostNL are developing cycling’s next safety breakthrough

The process started almost two years ago. In their previous guise as DSM, Picnic-PostNL had already pioneered the use of Dyneema fabric in clothing to improve resistance to abrasions in the event of crashing. By early 2024, Rooijakkers had turned his attention to the next step in wearable safety equipment.

“I thought, ok, now we have the surface wounds covered a bit, so we asked what we could do next,” Rooijakkers told media including Domestique. “What is, let’s say, crucial for performance and bad for your health? It’s breaking a bone, but that’s also a more difficult thing to tackle.”

The inspiration came, of all places, from Instagram, where Rooijakkers saw a short video demonstrating a wearable airbag for motorcyclists. “I thought we could make that for a rider too,” he said, though he pointed out that an airbag was essentially useless for the most commonly broken bone in cycling, the clavicle. 

“It doesn’t break from impact, but from a twist that the rider does himself, so in the end, the idea is to protect the hips, ribs and the vertebrae. That’s the area that we try to cover.”

Rooijakkers had begun sketching out the idea in the Spring of 2024 – “We needed to make a bag that inflates a CO2 cartridge, accelerometers and so on” – when he came into contact with Bert Celis of Aerobag, who was already working on a similar system. A partnership was quickly established.

“From that moment, I left my personal investigations go a bit, because now there was a really good engineer on it ten hours a day, and that works a bit better than me doing it,” he said. “He wanted to protect the bag with our protective fabric, so he reached out to us and explained what he was doing.

“I gave him my ideas, he shared his ideas, and then we said, ‘Ok, let’s do this more or less together, combine the ideas, and then we’ll see where we go.’”

Last week in Kortrijk, Aerobag displayed the product in public for the first time. The system is composed of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) tubes, electronic sensors and a CO2 cartridge, which inflates the airbag rapidly to a thickness of 9cm in the event of a crash to protect the back, ribs and hips. The idea is that the airbag would be carried on the back in a pouch sewn onto the bib shorts.

“I already see people saying, ‘But that’s not good for your vertebrae,’ but the airbag deploys around it, so it’s not like the race radio, which is also there and sometimes causes fractures,” said Rooijakkers, who added that the system is designed to deflate again within a few minutes to allow riders to resume racing. 

“Once it’s deployed, you’re pretty stuck, like in a fixed position, but still you can move, you can jump on your bike and within three minutes you have almost 100% of your movement back.”

The airbag is triggered when the sensors detect a significant change in the angle of the back or a major rotational acceleration, and Rooijakkers downplayed the prospect that the Aerobag could inadvertently inflate as has been known to happen with the ‘crash mode’ on Shimano’s Di2 gear system.

“We have to programme it so that it does not react so quickly in a crash,” he said. “That means that there are crashes where it would not deploy, so you have to find the balance a bit.”

Finding a balance between safety and performance will be key if the Aerobag is to be used in the WorldTour peloton. As things stand, the airbag is 600g, and it remains to be seen how many riders will be willing to carry that additional burden on a mountain pass.

“The engineers of Aerobag have an idea to make it lighter, but the first focus is to get it operational in a good way, and then to go into those small parts,” Rooijakkers said, though he conceded that the weight was never likely to go below 500g.

Even so, Rooijakkers is optimistic that the Aerobag could be the biggest development in wearable safety equipment since the hardshell helmet. While no piece of kit can completely remove the consequences of crashes, he believes it has the potential to reduce them considerably.

“The helmet didn’t protect riders from everything, and the airbag will not protect from everything either – but in the end, the helmet had a big impact,” said Rooijakkers, who spent five years as a professional rider with Skil-Shimano, the first iteration of his current team. 

“The helmet is a lifesaver sometimes, and hopefully the airbag also will be. It doesn’t cover everything, but I think it has the potential to be as big as the helmet.”

The Aerobag has been crash tested using 3D-printed cyclists, though there will also be some human testing on a foam landing surface, while crash test dummies will be deployed at a later date. The idea is that Picnic-PostNL riders will start to use the system in training during the season with the hope that it will be race-ready in 2027.

“To be safe, I would say next season – it depends on the bumps we will find along the road, because for sure some will pop up,” Rooijakkers said. “It’s all gone well up to now, and that’s also why we showed it at Velofollies. But I’m pretty sure there will be some delays and then

maybe a trial, and then we also need to make an agreement with the UCI so that we are able to race with it. In practice, that will take the whole season, but we hope to train with it within a much shorter time frame.”

The governing body has been kept abreast of the development, and while Picnic-PostNL are pioneers in using and developing the system, the technology belongs to Aerobag and so can be used by other teams.

“It doesn’t matter if somebody else uses it, that’s only good,” Rooijakkers said. “Aerobag is a different legal entity, and they have all the right to do talk to other teams, it’s within the agreement and it’s no problem. In the end, they also need the volume to make it work.”

It remains to be seen whether riders and teams will adopt the system en masse and whether, like the helmet, it eventually becomes mandatory for riders to be equipped with airbags.

“When they started to make helmets mandatory [in 2003], riders were allowed to throw it off at the bottom of a climb at the start, and riders were still doing Paris-Roubaix without a helmet in those days,” Rooijakkers said. “That’s how riders are in the beginning. But riders these days are pretty aware of the risks they face, so they’re not negative to it.”

But as with hardshell helmets, Rooijakkers believes that riders who grow up using the system are more likely to stick with it when they reach the senior ranks, and so Picnic-PostNL’s development riders will be encouraged to wear the airbag.

“We definitely start in a voluntary way in training,” he said. “We also have a devo team, and our riders are developed in a really broad sense, in sportsmanship and in lifestyle. So if you grow up training with an item like an airbag, you might want to try it in a race. And from there,  I can easily understand that when you turn into a World Tour pro rider, that you also take it on. With those riders, we don’t have to oblige anything, because they would be used to it.”