Soft landing system
Also called SLS, Air bag system, Bean bag system
A soft landing system is a set of air bags or bean bags laid beneath a work area so that a person who falls lands on them rather than on the floor or the ground. Like a safety net it is a collective safeguard for arresting falls — nobody has to clip on to it — and it is chosen where the fall distance is short enough for it to work and a net cannot readily be rigged.
In practice
The law names this equipment explicitly, which is more than it does for most site kit. Schedule 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 — the schedule covering collective safeguards for arresting falls — requires that in the case of an airbag, landing mat or similar safeguard, the safeguard be stable, and separately requires that a safeguard which distorts in arresting a fall afford sufficient clearance, and that steps be taken to ensure so far as practicable that the safeguard does not itself cause injury to the person falling. Stability is the requirement that gets designed out on site: bags pushed aside to get a load through, or laid to a coverage that leaves a gap at the edge where somebody is actually working, are no longer the safeguard that was planned. It is a genuinely different product from a rescue airbag, and the two are often confused because both are inflatable. A soft landing system is there to catch a fall. A rescue airbag is deployed after a fall has already been caught by something else, to get the casualty down.
Where this comes from: UK work at height practice. The only statutory wording specific to this equipment is in Schedule 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005, which is quoted below; what depth, coverage and layout are adequate for a given fall is a question for the manufacturer’s instructions and the person planning the work, not for a general page.
Where it matters on site
The distinction above is worth holding on to when specifying, because it decides what you still have to plan for. A soft landing system arrests the fall and leaves the person on a bag at floor level, so the rescue problem is small. A net arrests the fall and leaves the person suspended in it above a floor, so the rescue problem is real and needs its own equipment and its own timing. Our Safety Net Recovery System is the second kind — an inflatable rescue system, described on its own page as a soft-landing recovery system, weighing 25 kg and stored on the floor below the netted area — and it is not fall protection and does not substitute for any. Choosing between a net and a soft landing system is a decision about the fall; choosing what happens next is a separate decision, and skipping it is how sites end up with excellent fall protection and no way of finishing the job.