PADI AOW+ certs and depth rating

[afieldofblue]

Personally, standards are standards if I'm guiding someone or teaching. I won't go beyond depth standards with a person not qualified to do them. AOW? 100ft is the max. Deep? 130 even though I'd prefer a tech cert beyond 100.
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My experience with the lawyers who have contacted me to consult on cases has been that if a dive pro takes a person beyond their recommended levels and is getting any kind of compensation is taking quite a risk if an accident happens. That agency XYZ says their standards only apply to training is setting the pro up.

In a court of law, a jury is going to listen to the lawyer asking how can someone profess to adhere to standards in one area and disregard them in another? They don't care about the words. They are going to be looking at the wife and kids who lost a husband and father because you took them to 120 ft when they didn't have the training to be there.

As long as you observe the limits in any situation where you are leading the dive, you can say that you did not take an unnecessary risk with the person. Or add a level of risk that contributed to their death.

I agree -
Yet a key point is that there are no such standards when guiding, only recommendations and judgement considerations - and also that in the RTSC system divers are not required to be guided, and remain, even with a guide, divers diving in "autonomous" buddy teams.

To return to real world situations, I've had quite a few older divers (mostly North-American and especially Japanese) with say 500+ dives but an open-water card.

We usually ask them to do the AOW course or the Adventure Deep Dive so that the training aspect is covered, as most of our dives include quite a lot of time at 25m or so - but what transpires is that if they can justify sufficient experience beyond 18m / 60ft, we are allowed to take them below 18m on guided dives, which I thought was a breach of standards.
Fact is there are no such standards as far as non-training dives are concerned, just recommendations to dive within the limits of one's training and/or experience.

With a diver justifying numerous dives below 18m (logbook) and an OW card, the "training" aspect is not covered, however the experience part certainly is. So it is purely a judgment issue, both for the diver and the operator facilitating the dives.

Same kind of situation. There is a stationary thorny seahorse located at a depth of 32 to 34m at Richelieu Rock in the Surin National Park in Thailand. Training-wise, you'd need a deep-spec or tec training to go there.
90% of the hundreds of photographers going to shoot daily snaps of the poor little guy do not meet these training requirements, yet this is not actually a breach of standards in a non-training setting (it is however a breach of National Park Rules, since they set a 30m max rec diving depth, but that's another story...)

Fascinating stuff.
Would anyone have example of court cases where such questions of depth and training levels where brought up in a guided dive setting?

In France, the legal system is super strict when it comes to diving - certifications allow legal access to particular depths (mainly 0-20, 20-40 and 40-60m) with a clear distinction between guided and autonomous diving.
A N2 / CMAS 2** is autonomous to 20m (allowed to dive in autonomous buddy teams without a guide), and guided to 40m (the notion of a guided dive, "palanquée", is quite different from that found RSTC setting).
Liability releases are illegal and would actually play against the operator in court since they are a way of trying to avoid responsability - operator + staff is 100% responsible and if something happens, they need to justify that everything was done legally and safely to prove that they are not guilty.

If one does not have a medical certificate signed by a doctor, less than a year old, allowing the bearer to dive, one will not set foot in the water, even for a training in a standard swimming pool...
Because of this, interesting legal cases are presented in the legal section of Subaqua, main French Federation's publication.

I'd be very interested in examples of court rulings where such questions of depths/ training levels where brought up in a RSTC guided dive setting.

cheers