Just some thoughts on OMS wings.
1. Bungee wings have elastic cord laced around the bladder to supposedly keep it tight and streamlined at all times. What actually occurs is that surface folds are created in the wing, which with the bungees themselves increase turbulent water flow over this surface and thus the diver's drag.
2. The fore and aft profile is also greater with the bungeed wings. (More drag, heavier exertion, CO2 loading, etc.)
3. The bungees are very good entanglement points that pose an entrapment hazard. The bungee can not be easily reached if they do become snagged.
4. The bungees also serve to hold the bladder close to the diver's center of gravity, which makes it easier to roll, but makes it more difficult to maintain a perfect prone attitude in water. The standard unrestrained wings will float upward against the side of your tanks, resulting in a greater applied moment which helps keep you in a horizontal position, which is generally the position of greatest function for the diver (certainly from a decompression perspective).
5. The bungees also create a slight positive pressure within the bladder at all times, which will act to forcefully dump the wing when you hit the deflate. This is a faster dumping than the standard wing, but if you have a valve or fitting failure your gas may be all inadvertently dumped - very dangerous in an emergency situation.
6. The positive pressure in the restrained wing also creates a lung loading problem when orally inflating - just one more thing to contribute to injury or DCS.
7. This positive pressure in the bladder complicates using the inflator as a tertiary backup regulator,
8. OMS provides buoyancy compensators with as much as one hundred pounds of lift (as advertised by the manufacturer). If a diver is using the correct tanks for his or her particular application (considering the buoyancy characteristics) and is correctly weighted, there is absolutely no need for this amount of buoyancy in any situation.
9. Bungee wings were developed in response to the perceived need for additional buoyancy to support excessively weighted divers. It is irresponsible to dive with weight that cannot be ditched in an emergency and the use of a gross displacement device is a mistaken compensation for an erroneous practice.
10. Cost more
A diver must "settle for nothing less than perfection. Those who do will discover on their own the value
of such effort. Those who do not will never understand what the others are talking about".
Brad
