Redundancy Required for Decompression Diving?

[Dish]

If someone wants to go from OW certification to doing AN/DP diving, why shouldn't they be able to learn it on their own, just like a pilot can learn to fly, and then simply book an exam to demonstrate their knowledge and skills? Learning to fly requires a very few hours of training with an instructor (akin to OW training), and then they are free to go fly solo as much as they want until they are ready to fly with an examiner and get their pilot's ticket. They can do all the "classroom" work online. Why do you think learning to dive requires so much more hands-on in-person training than learning to fly and can't be done using books and self-practice?

Ah, stuartv, not so fast, my friend. Your description of the flight training process as an analogue for dive training is a bit too loose. I won't go into specifics, because most of the readers on this board are probably not all that interested, but you're not permitted to fly solo unless your instructor feels that you a safe enough to do so (after a absolute minimum of 10 hours of instruction) and can then only fly as the instructor permits. Some folks take quite a bit longer to earn a solo endorsment... sometimes 50 hours or so. In this case you are training to profiency, not number of hours (in the case of diving, that might correlate to numbers of dives or total bottom time). In the end, one cannot simply "book an exam", but you require the flight instructor's endorsement that you have attained a level of proficiency that ensures you will pass the flight evaluation by a FAA-designated examiner. Instructors that habitually endorse candidates that fail this exam can have their certificates revoked. Check and balance.

Not that this has anything to do with redundancy required for deco diving...

 

[jseyfert3]

From growing up with a dad who has his private pilot's license, a mom who almost got hers, and a wife who was a solo cross country flight and a few more hours of general practice from her FAA exam (till medical issues stopped her and she never finished the training when they were cleared), I thought there was a bit more than "a couple hours" before you could fly solo. Thanks for describing that. I'd be one of the few interested in the specifics, wanting to get my own license in a few years.

 

[KenGordon]

*** disclaimer: This will hurt the feelings of people that think you need an instructor to learn how to continue diving ***

[rant]
I'll bite, but just because I'm really bored, and tired of the "muh pay to train or die" spirit that's coming up here...

I said it's common sense to figure out what makes sense in an argument you'll find online and what does not. So let's discuss, and answer your questions, simply for the sake of it, even if it's not what I was talking about.

ICD? How many cases of that are there? I'm too bored to go look it up in deco for divers, my bet is that there's enough info in there for anyone to make his mind up about "Can I swich from normoxic trimix to Nx32" (which funnily is almost the first google hit on "deco for divers ICD", and points to a rather funny thread about ICD on a 45m dive)
Which way to route hoses? Which one do you want? Hog? Type in google: "Hogarthian hose routing", probably one of the first 3 links will do that for you, with an explanation. Oh, btw, Hog is not the only way of doing it. If you have a look at the guys in the French lakes, they do things differently.
A proper weight check? Really? You want to be neutral at the end of the dive, that's gonna be seriously difficult, "scuba weight check" absolutely gives NOTHING that makes sense on Google here, damn, you got me.
How to reach the valves? Well, there's at least a dozen threads on google that are gonna show up.
The order? You mean GUE V-drill, some other fancy thing, something invented by some other guys that prefered doing it that way, or finally the "turn all the valves you can get approach" that is often taught?
Best mix? Is it that complicated? Easy way out: grab standard gases, boom! No more worries about "Should I get 31 or 32% of Helium? What if the blender gets the O2 wrong by 1% and I have to make a whole scene because now I'll dive a pO2 of 1.42 and I really can't do that?!"


But I guess, since the instructor "uses a value and why" is sufficient to say that the manual is useless and that it is worth nothing ?

[/rant]

If all these things are s blindingly obvious with a quick google how come a large proportion of the diving population are rubbish? Why so many people on here asking how much weight they need? Have you never taken lead of a person who insists they are correctly weighted?

Wrt mixes. What gasses should I use for a 60m dive with me on a rebreather and my buddy OC? What happens if I think I'd like to be a bit less narked?

Compare endless googling with just discussing that with an expert who can draw the picture of an inner ear and explain the stuff buried on TDF and referenced in the thread you found. Who are PfcAJ , Mark, Simon and Bruce anyway? Who to trust?

The shutdown thing is a good example. On the forums there is more than one way put forward. Which to choose? And that assumes you can manage the manipulation. And if you cannot? Are there YouTube videos of people failing exactly the way you do? A decent instructor will have seen your failure mode before and be able to suggest how to change what you are doing to be able to manipulate the valves. Or perhaps his IT explained the common ones.

Hose routing. Nobody makes big fuss over which post feeds the BC and the drysuit. I'll be ok swapping that round, after all I always had the Drysuit fed from the right on a single. No problem?

 

[DevonDiver]

From what I can tell it's pretty normal to start Fundies and be taught what you need to do, but not to get a pass.

Which is surprising for your surely?

Given that everything you need to know for a Fundies pass is on YouTube...

According to your repeated claims, anyone should be able to watch the videos, learn the standards and breeze a Fundies pass.... . and yet they can't.

They need that instructor guided practice... and having received it, gain the knowledge and skills needed to raise their game sufficiently.

Is it not disjointed to claim that anyone can self-educate to become an advanced/tech diver etc.... whilst at the same time acknowledging that to reach the basic prerequisite standards to start tech training one needs an expert instructor's guidance??

 

[DevonDiver]

I saw my DM on the reef dives shoot a bag at the end. I thought I should know how to do that.... I watched a GUE video on YouTube that showed me how to shoot a bag... How hard was that?

Depends on how good your technique is.

It's easy for novices to miss the small details and critical attributes that make a skill really effective, or just superficially so.

It takes me about 30-60 minutes to teach an average tech student to properly deploy a DSMB. Most think they can already do it... and find there's a catalogue of improvements they should make. The devil is in the details....

30-60 minutes isn't long... it's a basic skill. But it's a long time considering that most already feel they've 'mastered' it before we start... (most from watching YouTube etc...)

 

[KevinNM]

30-60 minutes isn't long... it's a basic skill. But it's a long time considering that most already feel they've 'mastered' it before we start... (most from watching YouTube etc...)

I'll bet the end of that 30-60 minutes can they can't reliably do it maintaining the correct ascent rate all the way to the surface with the team also doing an s-drill. To misquote some guy: Everything in diving is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

 

[DevonDiver]

They'll do it in 40-50 seconds, on top of everything else they need to do. This is the benefit of good instruction versus do-it-yourself training.

I spent that much time on DSMB deployment... you can guess how long we'd spent on fundamental elements leading up to that... and other skills afterwards also.

 

[archer1960]

...

My point was that from training and reading, it seems universal to get back on the boat with 500 PSI or more, to leave a reserve, but these two tech divers who brought pony bottles for redundancy drained their main tanks below what they should have, if the pony bottle was truly for redundancy, and they should have, IMO, ended the dive a couple minutes earlier to get back on the boat with 500+, pony bottle or not.

"On the boat with 500" may be common, but it's certainly not universal. Both trips I've taken to Coz, the DMs had us STARTING UP at 500 (700 on a couple of the deeper dives) psi in in AL80. No mention of what they wanted us to have left on the boat, but I don't think I ever used more than 200 on the way up, and it may only have been 100 including the safety stop.

 

[boulderjohn]

Given that everything you need to know for a Fundies pass is on YouTube...

According to your repeated claims, anyone should be able to watch the videos, learn the standards and breeze a Fundies pass.... . and yet they can't.

I recently had a person who had passed GUE Fundies take my tech course, and it took him more than a few tries to get his valve shutdown drill to the passing level. Yet we are told in a recent thread that such skills are so easy that any new OW student can do them.

There seems to be a disconnect somewhere between people's understanding of what it takes to learn those skills and reality.

 

[CptTightPants21]

I recently had a person who had passed GUE Fundies take my tech course, and it took him more than a few tries to get his valve shutdown drill to the passing level. Yet we are told in a recent thread that such skills are so easy that any new OW student can do them.

There seems to be a disconnect somewhere between people's understanding of what it takes to learn those skills and reality.

I can definitely understand that one. Getting the valve drill under a minute isn't a high priority for most fundies classes/instructors that I have seen. Doing it correctly with total control and non-movement is a higher emphasis.

As for the disconnect, definitely. People forget the amount of time and effort they really put into getting where they are skill-wise and they also have strong perceptual narrowing when it comes to their current skills. Looking back, there is no doubt that my skill level has increased tremendously over my last 100 dives; if you had asked me 100 dives ago what my skill level was I would have said good or very good. Sometimes we can only look at thins correctly with the passage of time and the distance of experience; imagine where you will be in another 100 dives and what your current self might look like.