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stedel: Full disclosure here: I'm not a scuba instructor. I don't have 1,000+ dives. I have no experience with scuba accident analysis. However, I do have a fair amount of teaching experience. Based on my credentials, I'll have to live with the possibility that you will choose to ignore everything I write.
The example you give is a good one. Based on the physical dimensions of the student, you would have us believe that there was nothing that you could do to prevent your student's rapid uncontrolled ascent. Let me blunt here. This kind of hopeless, it's-out-of-my-hands kind of thinking might help assuage your conscience but it does little to prevent similar situations in the future.
I would probably have to agree with you that, in your example, once the student decided to bolt, there was very little that you could do. But what about modifying the training so that the possibility of this is minimized? More specifically, create exercises to build the confidence of the student in a stepwise manner. For instance, to help set up the student for success with the mask clearing exercise, one could:
- Do some breathing exercises at the surface first. Breathe in through the mouth and out through the nose. Teach the student to be relaxed in the water.
- Allow the student to do some snorkeling at the surface, first with a mask and then without.
- Have the student breath off of his regulator just below the surface of the water with a mask...then without a mask.
- Have him breathe off of his regulator at the bottom of the shallow end (3 feet) of the pool with his mask...and then without it.
- Have him do the mask-clearing drill in 3 feet of water.
- Have him repeat all of these exercises until he is really comfortable with them (mastery?) before moving to the deep end of the pool for the mask-clearing exercise.
I think the last point is key. By becoming proficient at all of these incremental exercises, the student greatly reduces the probability that he will bolt to the surface during mask-clearing at the deep end of the pool.
It is possible to do these exercises and adopt such an approach to training even when affiliated with an agency that, by most accounts, has the most watered-down set of basic OW requirements in the industry. I know at least one PADI instructor who does this. He doesn't teach large classes. His classes can take several weeks (sometimes months) to complete, but after the confined water dives in basic OW class he's confident that his students won't bolt during the OW dives. He also insists on having a pool session at the beginning of each AOW class during which every student performs all of the skills that he was asked to do in basic OW, including the swim and tread water tests. He then proceeds to schedule the navigation and night dives prior to the deep dive.
I think that the PADI instructor I know is a good one. He has taken steps, above and beyond what is required by his agency, to ensure that his students will be successful...that they will be safe, confident divers. This doesn't eliminate the possibility altogether that his students will succumb to panic under water, but it dramatically reduces the chances of that happening.
And before someone reiterates a motion for splitting this training discussion off to another thread, I'd like to state my case for leaving this post and the discussion that follows here in the A&I forum.
The issue of training bears direct relevance to this tragedy. To say otherwise, is myopic and downright dangerous. I don't think we should be throwing up our hands and saying: "Well, we did everything we could do. Bad stuff happens. It's tragic that this student died. Let's not talk about it any longer for fear of hurting the instructor's feelings." It's not an issue of "innocent until proven guilty" or "guilty until proven innocent" or being "insensitive." If we don't take an
objective look at the chain of events influencing the outcome, then we are doomed to have more students die during dive training...needlessly. The loss is great for the individual, tragic for family/friends/loved ones, and traumatic for the instructor/DMs involved. I don't think anyone wants that.
It's my understanding that certain towns and cities wait for "X" number of accidents or fatalities to occur at an intersection before putting up a stoplight. Perhaps we should be looking at changing the dive curriculum in light of this tragedy. Perhaps the training agency in question should
require a pool session (during which
all of the basic OW skills are reviewed and swim + treading water test are done)
before any AOW dives are conducted.
