Appeal No. 2001-2392 Page 5
Application No. 09/114,962
and therefore would not have suggested the modification to Haviland proposed by the
examiner.
We find ourselves in agreement with the appellant. The airbag system disclosed in
Haviland is located in the zone that would be crushed in the event of a side impact, and the
reference provides no details concerning the location of the sensor. Breed appears to be
concerned with improvements to airbag systems that respond only when there is frontal
impact upon a vehicle, for there is no mention of side impacts or side impact airbag
systems. The objective of the Breed invention is to locate damped sensors outside of the
crush zone, particularly if they are of the type which can rapidly discriminate between
crashes that do and do not require air bag deployment, because this results in a simpler
system (column 1). Most importantly to our conclusion, Breed states at the outset that
“[t]his invention provides a damped sensor for use outside the crush zone of a vehicle or in
other words a non-crush zone sensor” (column 1, lines 63-65, emphasis added) and, in our
view, there is nothing in the detailed explanation of the invention which would convey to one
of ordinary skill in the art that it also can be used within a crush zone. In fact, a reading of
the patent would, in our view, provide no such suggestion to one of ordinary skill in the art.
From our perspective, the only suggestion for utilizing the Breed system, which the
patent teaches is for use only outside of a crush zone, in the Haviland arrangement of
airbags, which are located within the side crush zones of the vehicle, is the hindsight
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