Historically there are between ten and thirty deaths during instruction (amongst US Citizens, or in US waters) each year. The typical case involves a OW student who becomes separated from his or her instructor and is later found ... dead. When a good autopsy is done, the cause of death is typically an AGE. Lies on the medical form rarely have anything to do with this.
This seemed to me to be so totally incorrect that I first went through the last two DAN fatality reports, case by case, to see what they say about fatalities associated with instruction. In those two years combined, there were 4 fatalities associated with OW instruction and 1 fatality associated with AOW instruction. There was another that was hard to define. Here are the summaries. Decide for yourself what this indicates.
2008 Report
06-21 and 06-27: These are so similar that when I read the descriptions I thought it was the same incident repeated. Both divers were 29 years old and obese. The autopsies revealed severe coronary artery disease and the conclusion in each case was that the student had a cardiac event during the dive.
06-51: (This one is troubling.) The student surfaced in a panic while doing an OW dive in a reiver with a strong current and very limited visibility. The student was in a dry suit.
06-73: The description said the diver was a student who had completed pool sessions, but it appears to me that the dive was
not done as part of instruction. There is no indication of instruction or an instruction, and the diver was apparently with a buddy only. The cause of death is unknown and is considered "suspicious."
2007 Report
05-32: The student thumbed the training dive and began swimming back to shore. While on the surface he began to struggle and lost consciousness. The cause of death was determined to be a cardiac event.
05-48: The description of this one is sketchy. The student was doing an AOW class and was doing a night dive as his fourth dive of the day. (If this was PADI, it is a standards violation.) He lost consciousness and was brought to the surface by the instructor. There was no determination of a reason for his loss of consciousness.
