terrasmak:
Lets see 200 feet , someone stupid enought to drop weights , they would probably be bent into a pretzel when they hit the surface if there not dead from it.
I'm not being argumentative, since I have no experience here (the deepest I've gone is 80 ft and that was with the floor just another 5 ft below me), but is dropping weights the stupid thing to do in all scenarios? Granted, simply getting into this position may show poor judgement, but can't it happen that someone loses buoyancy control over an abyss (or over a depth they are not prepared to go) due to a) bladder failure b) insufficient gas left to inflate the bc further at that depth c) fatigue, cramping, loss of orientation that inhiibits finning to the surface? Is not pulling at least some weight an option (the lesser of two evils)?
A tec instructor in our LDS related a story: he was part of a team doing a 300 ft wreck dive. At a decompression stop, I don't recall the depth but it was 100 to 150 ft range, one of the team mistakenly switched to his pure oxygen and immediately began to convulse. They were in no position to ascend with him, so they inflated his bc, pulled his weights and sent him to the surface with a "godspeed my friend". When they finished their ascent, they found their friend breathing oxygen on the boat unharmed. A miracle to be sure, and I have no clue if this was the "correct" handling of this disaster, but that was the story. Like many stories, it may be BS, I wasn't there. However, there are no doubt cases of missile launches from the depths without serious injury, and not just "bounces" where people have spent little or no time at depth.
My point is that some people survive maximal ascent rates and others don't and, since the statistics suggest that such ascents make up a large fraction of deaths and injuries (particularly if we exclude heart attacks underwater or on the surface, which aren't really scuba accidents in my opinion), it would be nice to know why. It may be, as has been suggested above, a simple matter of not holding your breath.