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As you pursue this case, you should be aware that there is a complication in terms of authorities dealing with this sort of thing. The agency (PADI in this case) has no real legal authority to act--the most they can do is expel the instructor and/or dive operation from the agency. It would be up...

Yes, the instructor or a certified assistant must be in the water and directly supervising the student. There is no question about that. There have been plenty of precedents on that issue. Do you have information that your brother was in the water unsupervised when he had his accident?

There was no problem with open circuit bubbles. First of all, most people on the team were on rebreathers, including all the people doing the deepest work. Next, the problem was that the army corps of engineers had tried to fill the cave opening with tons of loose rock, and the path through all...

This may be hard to believe, but what most people call an overhead is actually possible during an OW class. It is also possible for routine OW dives. This all came out to me when I was in a discussion on the topic of overheads with PADI headquarters. During that discussion, I learned the...

You seem to believe that heart attacks only happen during strenuous activity. The primary cause for a heart attack is the condition of the heart. The most common occasion for a heart attack is sitting around in the morning, about breakfast time. The second most common time that heart attacks...

Mike and Shane were part of a team (ADM) headed by Curt Bowen. The cave had been opened a year before by an earlier team led by Bowen. This team was charged with both exploration of the deeper parts of the cave and opening up the upper parts to make it more accessible. Mike and Shane were the...

do you find it hard to believe that people have heart attacks while bowling?

As has been noted frequently in the past, teaching students while they are neutrally buoyant does not take any more time than teaching them while they are kneeling on the floor. You do not have to teach it as a separate skill. It happens while they are learning everything else.

As you say, it has not been validated--we just don't know. But here is some information I learned in the past from a presentation at our dive shop from a DAN representative about 15 years ago. What follows is a bit fuzzy in the details because of memory, but the big idea is accurate. IIRC, with...

You are missing my point. If you are in a situation where you need to drop weights at depth, then by all means you should drop weights at depth. The issue is that such a need almost never arises. The oft-quoted statement that all those people died with their weight systems intake implies that...

A friend witnessed a very near fatality that sounds almost exactly like this one. My friend had gotten on the boat after a dive at the popular Spiegel Grove dive site and taken off her gear. She heard their DM shouting to another boat, telling them they had a diver in trouble. The boat did not...

I cannot estimate how many times you have written this over the past two decades. I cannot estimate how many times I have responded by pointing out a study I did of several DAN fatality studies showed not a single case in which ditching weights at depth clearly would have made a difference. The...

Seven years ago someone posted a question about MOD's in the SSI forum. It asked about something that he encountered in what he thought was SSI instruction. Someone else recently posted in that thread, pointing out that the course material quoted was actually from SDI, not SSI, and he said that...

The thing to do is to ask the question in the SDI forum. I will do that.

So here's a question about this "out and back safely" philosophy. A couple years ago, a South Florida dive operation took a group of divers out for a day of diving. It first went to a deep wreck diving site and dropped a group off. It then went to another shallower wreck site and tied off for...

In South Florida, many winter dives are iffy because of weather, chiefly high winds. Let's say it looks pretty bad, and diving could be dangerous. If the diver looks at the weather and decides it's too rough, if the diver has prepaid, the diver is not likely to get a refund. So the boat goes...

Scoring rubrics are often vague for the reason I mentioned above--with too much detailed specificity, they become unusable. Worse than that, the details can mask reality, as I used to demonstrate in presentations by showing how such a clear and objective rubric, seemingly perfectly fine at first...

I have written about this in the past based upon my experience in the world of education. In assessment theory, a scoring guide for assessing student performance that is too complicated is worthless--assessors ignore it and go by their own internal guidelines. The same is true for manuals and...

I just finished a very nice week of diving in the Caribbean at age 75.

Here is a factor that you should consider when getting advice at dive shops and from forums like this one. I made a small allusion to it in my first post, and I will go into it more thoroughly now. When I adopted the ScubaPro Jet as my fin when I started tech diving, it was in large part...