Why don't commercial or SAT divers have an octo...?

[Akimbo]

This pressure would have been a hot pressure and probably not much more than 200 bar and the gas used was always 16/84 Heliox.

For other readers (Searcaigh knows this stuff):
The advantage of filling bailouts in the chamber is you can fill to (or above) the rated pressure over bottom pressure. That doesn't mean much at 60 meters but is a lot more gas at the 1000'/300M range. For non-divers reading this, that is 445 PSI more gas at 1000' or about 30 bar at 300M m.

The disadvantage is divers had to be careful to vent off some pressure in bailouts before decompressing the whole system or sending them to the surface or blow-out plugs could go off. A sudden and unexpected release of HP gas in a sat complex jolts a LOT of divers and support crew into action. Escaping gas can kill people fast if it is depressurizing the manned chambers, dumping the wrong gas in a chamber, or pressurizing maned chambers.

 

[bakodiver391]

A book I can highly recommend is "Dragon Sea" by Frank Pope. It explains commercial and sat diving in layman's terms within the context of South China Sea porcelain wreck salvage, which my sometime boss also used to do. A great book that reads like fiction but is all factual, I believe I saw a documentary on the salvage as well some years ago.

 

[Akimbo]

Commercial Oil-Field Diving by Nicholas B. Zinkowski is an out of print book that was first written in 1971. Zinkowski was one of those divers during the big money era of sat diving in the Gulf of Mexico. It was used as a text book in commercial diving schools for years. Unlike most books I have read on commercial diving, there is no self-aggrandizing or exaggeration of what the commercial diving world was like in those days. It is very outdated now.

Zinkowski was also part of a the team that attempted the first saturation dive on the Andrea Doria. They were skunked by weather and never got into sat.

@Oceanaut's The History of Oilfield Diving: An Industrial Adventure by Christopher Swann is the gold standard on how the entire industry evolved as it grew from air diving into helium and sat diving. He has posted several chapters in Diving History: Tales from the Abyss.