Un-"Fit" for airbag diagnosis

Question

My daughter has a 2009 Honda Fit Sport. When we bought the car about a year ago, I noticed one thing and didn't notice another concerning the airbags. During POST at first startup, the airbag light is supposed to come on, stay on for a few seconds, then go out. This tells the driver the system is working correctly. When we first bought the car, I didn't realize the light wasn't coming on at all. I did, however, plug my scanner into the OBDII port and read the SRS system, which shows no codes are present. Since it shows no codes are present, I know it is at least communicating with the SRS system (you can see the scanner saying it is starting comms with the SRS module). Since there is no light present, this still tells me there's something going on with the system. This could be as simple as the light being covered with a piece of black electrical tape or possibly the LED which illuminates it has gone out ... I don't know as of yet. The second thing which is confusing is, the passenger side airbag light (which should illuminate when there's nobody in the seat showing that airbag as inoperable) is blinking while the car is turned on.

The scanner is picking up no codes. I've looked on the internet to see what could be the issue with the blinking passenger side airbag light, but nothing even close to conclusive.

My question is, how would I go about diagnosing what is going on?

UPDATES

I took the dash apart under the suspicion of unscrupulous selling practices. My hunch was right: someone put black electrical tape over the main airbag, side airbag, and TPMS dash lights. All three now show illuminated. The side airbag light blinks in time with the passenger airbag light on the dash (under the radio). This modifies my question to:

How can the reader tell me there's nothing wrong (no codes) yet the airbag light is on? What may be going on here? Without proper diagnostics connection, how can I tell what's going on with the SRS?

Answer 1

The answer to this question is, that when there is an accident with airbag deployment, the airbag computer has a "flag" (for lack of a better word) in it which has to be reset. Until you get it reset, it's basically a dead system even if you replace the deployed airbags. To fix the issue, there are companies which will provide a service to reset the codes. I found these are relatively cheap in comparison to purchasing a new computer and getting it "attuned" to your vehicle (with the need to set the VIN within the computer and whatever else they do). To get one new or out of a wrecking yard will cost you (here in the States) ~$1,000 at the time of this post, whereas to get the original computer reset only costs about $50 (plus shipping). A much more affordable endeavor.