Is there an instructor crisis?

[Wookie]

I thought all the holes in the skiing analogy were sufficiently revealed a number of posts ago?

Skiing seems to be the chosen equivalency.

You prefer surfing? They don't have mandatory certification either.

 

[berndo]

Do you have any data on what the percentage of fatalities or maimings per capita before organized instruction?
Were they dropping like flies?

Do you really think a person with 100 dives and some training is going do worse than a random person? You can probably do better job than a new PADI instuctor, but you'd be in the minority for sure. I'd rather have some standard than non.

You mean like all of the skiing regulations?

And lawsuits?

Lawsuits because people fall over? All this lawsuit stuff only seems to happens in the States. I don't know, maybe vote for some other dude next time. Other places you only get in trouble when you're suspected to have been grossly negligent.

I already said I find it silly to compare skiing to scuba.
Scuba diving and scuba businesses already are regulated by the government in some countries in case you didn't know.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I have a feeling we are getting close to the logic sequence I have seen hundreds of times on ScubaBoard. It goes like this.

1. Pretty much all divers you see suck because of crappy instruction.
2. Instruction is crappy because all the instructors who taught them are incompetent.
3. If you want to learn something about scuba, you are better off staying away from certified instructors and choosing a Mentor. A Mentor is a certified diver who will show you the ropes. A proper Mentor has no instructor training and no liability insurance.
4. Mentors are all better than certified instructors.
5. To find a Mentor, just go to anyone in the pool of divers identified in #1 above.

In the near future we might not be needing to worry about any of this if insurance continues to soar to stratospheric levels. There won’t be any instructors (crappy or not) to produce anything.
Maybe in tropical scuba land things are just great but not so much in other places.
Maybe minimal instruction works there, it doesn’t here.
I recently dived with a few divers that were professionally trained by instructors. One didn’t know we were supposed to do a 15’ safety stop because he’d never heard of it. The other couldn’t remove or replace his reg and also had no idea what a 15’ stop was AND almost ran out if air because no one told him you’re supposed to look at your SPG once in a while. That’s how I know he couldn’t do an air share.
One was SSI (dive shop class), and the other was PADI (one on one with his brother-in-law instructor.)

I’m almost thinking a lot of times it’s the student not the instructor, instead of the other way around.

Could have a good mentor done better? Maybe.
All the information is out there you just have to study it. A lot of the information is a lot better than an instructor will let you know about or know himself/herself. How many people learn about things, important things, after they get certified by self study?
I know I did.

 

[Lorenzoid]

Skiing seems to be the chosen equivalency.

You prefer surfing? They don't have mandatory certification either.

No, a number of posts pointed out reasons why skiing without any training is less likely to kill you than scuba diving without any training. My own contributions were that people instinctively feel when they're starting to lose control sliding down a hill, whereas in scuba there is often no such feedback before it's too late, and also it's natural to start on the bunny hill and learn incrementally, whereas in scuba you're either underwater or you're not. Skiing is a terrible analogy.

 

[MidOH]

Its kinda hard to find a comparable sport.

None of the other ones will make you to explode if you hold your breath on the way to safety.

Skydiving maybe. If you pull the spare tire cord, instead of the main chute rip cord.

 

[berndo]

Skiing seems to be the chosen equivalency.

You prefer surfing? They don't have mandatory certification either.

Hey Captain Frank. Why do we need licences or certifications for operating dive boats or any boats? Driving a boat is way easier than learing to ski, scuba or driving a car. A kid can drive a boat. What's up with that?

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

In the near future we might not be needing to worry about any of this if insurance continues to soar to stratospheric levels. There won’t be any instructors (crappy or not) to produce anything.
Maybe in tropical scuba land things are just great but not so much in other places.

Maybe we will get gas fills from the back of some van when no one is looking.....

Pressurized air/nitrox/trimix will be added to the list of illegal substances.

 

[boulderjohn]

Do you have any data on what the percentage of fatalities or maimings per capita before organized instruction?
Were they dropping like flies?

I did some reading on the earliest history a couple years ago. This is from memory. What I am writing is centered on the USA. I know little about the history elsewhere.

What we consider to be scuba instruction really started with the Scripps Institute in California in the early 1950s, and they created their version of scuba instruction in response to a diver death. When they created the course, they reportedly had no idea at first what to teach. They supposedly asked themselves what could go wrong and made up what they should teach for those occasions. A couple years later, Los Angeles County decided to make scuba part of their recreational program, and they sent one of their people (Al Tillman) to Scripps to learn how they did it. He came back to Los Angeles and made the Scripps system the Los Angeles system.

In the meantime, people were setting up as independent paid scuba instructors all across the nation, pretty much making it up as they went. The YMCA taught scuba, but each individual site had its own style of instruction.

Al Tillman and others in the LA program thought America needed a nationwide program. Since LA County's program was taxpayer supported, they could not expand it beyond the county. They brought professional instructors together from all over the country to see if they could form a new organization, with the biggest session being in Houston in 1960. A group of instructors from Chicago under the direction of a man named Dennis Erickson nearly took over and ran the resulting organization, but Tillman got control and became NAUI instructor #1.

They tried to run NAUI like the Taxpayer-supported LA county, relying on donations for primary funding, but it did not go well. In 1965, they announced that they needed to pull back from national work and focus on California, canceling a planned Chicago instructor training program. The Chicago group, still led by Dennis Erickson, responded by forming a new agency, calling themselves PADI.

So there really wasn't a lot of time between the invention of scuba and the creation of agency instruction. There weren't a lot of divers, and there isn't much in the way of statistical evidence from that time. The speed at which this all took place can be seen by an incident that took place in Australia in 1965 or 1966. A group of divers were planning a week of diving, and the boat captain announced that no one would be allowed to dive without a certification card. That only impacted one uncertified diver, who explained that he had learned to dive from his father and had done thousands of dives since then. The captain was unimpressed, but he eventually gave in and allowed Jean-Michelle Cousteau to dive without a certification card. (Cousteau is now PADI certified.)

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Liability and law suits seems to be the boogy man in the closet for any of this, and is the reason for so many rules, regulations, and fear.
But I still can’t get past things like surfing and freediving. They require no certification but can kill or injure people too, and they involve water. Who gets sued when something goes wrong?
If there was a certification required and involved any form of insurance then you have a target.
An attorney doesn’t go after anything that doesn’t have a source for a payout; Attorneys are only interested if there something to take.
If uncle Bob teaches little Frankie how to scuba dive and Frankie croaks diving, who sues uncle Bob for his trailer and his pot that he doesn’t have to piss in?
Where does the line stop for the oversee-er to stop protecting people from themselves?

 

[TravelGas]

I thought all the holes in the skiing analogy were sufficiently revealed a number of posts ago?

Does that mean we aren't going to talk skiing anymore? At least that increased the participation level around here.