Flight training is entirely disjoint from dive training.
Among other things your flight instructor is certified by someone who has
no connection whatsoever to the business of selling his services. That is, the fox
does not guard the henhouse in flight training - either for your instructor OR for you, as a student. Indeed, when you are signed off as a pilot, you get signed off by a flight examiner - not an instructor paid by the shop that you just bought the training from.
>>True, and good point. The FAA certified flight examiner has no bias toward a particular school other than his experience as to whether they send him qualified pilots. My point was more relating to what you learn in the journey to a certification (the training) and not the certification title itself. I have certainly seen some awful dive instruction. I did my OW on a referral with a shop in Cozumel. There was one woman who "passed" the certification and could not properly assemble her own gear! In fact on the boat she wanted to use my gear I had assembled. I told her no way.....I could NOT BELIEVE they allowed her to be certified as OW. So I certainly recognize some of the deficiencies with some instructors, but as a whole the concept of training is still a valid and in my opinion the safest and best way to learn. The agencies are too loose in certification standards but thankfully some instructors take it upon themselves to create standards and provide good learning.
One does not wake up in the morning with dive knowledge - you need to learn it from somewhere. You are trusting someone even with your methods whether it's a buddy or an author. You referenced earlier that you don't care for the "trust me" portion of dive training but you can't escape it. You trust an author and a buddy. I trust an author, a dive instructor, and my buddies who referred me to this instructor. I also trust in my own sense as to whether these persons know their sh*t.<<
This is
not true for any level of dive training. In each and every instance, the instructors are "certified" by folks who have too many inherent conflicts of interest to be able to provide an objective view, and at no time are they subject to outside, independant review.
>>I agree - I have to trust in the selection process for a good instructor. <<
You bring up an interesting situation - grabbing the wrong bottle at 130'. If you do that, then by definition you have failed to learn what you need to know.
>>Ha ha, if I do this I am an idiot! More to my point though - a good instructor will help you recognize mistakes - that is definitely part of the learning process. Reading a book or diving with a buddy who is not specifically there by desire to watch your every move may not notice a potentially fatal error such as this. Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes caused by distraction or stress or whatever. During my flight training my instructor once took me up in "moderate turbulance" with "wind shear" in a single engine small plane. I had done the procedures a few times at this point and academically knew what I was supposed to do. The plane was bashing about so hard I could barely spell my name.....let alone demonstrate and exercise everything I needed to know and do. The lesson was that weather rules machines and pilots - know your limits and work within them. Ponit being a good can instructor add value to your training experience.<<
There are protocols that will prevent this - and there are instructors who don't use or believe in them! There are also instructors who think that dropping deco bottles in the ocean on a penetration dive is a reasonable thing to do. I disagree, and point to the list of people who have died as a direct result of having done so as justification for my position. They say "but you can't get in there with that profile" and I say in response "if so, then I'm not GOING in there!"
Where I find fatal fault with the current means of dive instruction is that (1) the fox guards the henhouse, which means there is zero outside accountability for either instructor or student, and (2) the instructors and agencies have rigged the game (through the waiver system) so that even if they are woefully incompetent you can't use external process to force a correction of the situation for that particular individual.
As such I refuse to play, and instead choose to make the effort to learn what needs to be learned without the unholy influence and
risk that this rigged system is designed to offload on my shoulders. If I am going to take this risk
by every agencies' design then I am going to do so
without feeding the dragon that has caused the situation to exist, since I see no material difference in the risk profile in taking this path, and I
do see benefit and
decreased risk to a path of incrementalism that I simply cannot achieve with
any formal dive training path. Once I reach the point where I am comfortable doing what the class was to have taught me, I no longer need the class.
>>I don't agree but the decision and risk and trust is yours to take. <<
This then reduces me to choosing whether or not to "buy a card" down the road - and
that decision is one based purely on access considerations. That is, if I must to get into some place or on some boat that I wish to go use, then my hand is forced and I must either comply with what I perceive as an extortion racket or forego that dive. But by that point I'm already doing the dive(s) that people say I need the card to do - and the fact that I haven't killed myself is pretty good evidence that I have indeed learned the material.
>>Ha ha - "I'm not dead yet" is not a justification you know what you are doing! You may be an incredible diver but I'm saying this thinking is just plain crazy in my opinion.<<
No, perhaps this path is not for everyone. But I will note that prior to the card-selling era we are in now, essentially all divers followed this path.
This is an interesting thread to follow, as are a few other heated ones at the moment (and most weeks).
