Why do we hate the Air2?

[BDSC]

As for doing stops in a less than trim position being unsafe there is absolutely no physiological or scientific evidence to support that idea. "A 33% margine of error on a safety stop" by being out of trim!!?? are you for real?? you may want to do some thinking about that one.

That one got me too. To be honest, if I were to assist an OOA diver, (assuming we are talking about recreational diving) I doubt I would even do a "safety stop" unless that diver has become perfectly calm and even then I don't know that I would do it. I would think that all that person would care about is reaching the surface, getting that mask off, and taking a deep breath of fresh air. As long as we had a reasonable rate of accent, I see no real need to do a safety stop in that situation.

 

[danvolker]

I'll say it again...all the "problems" to which Dan refers has to do with training, not the gear. There is really no "specialized" training needed to properly use an AirII.

I disagree here, becauase most of the open water students have been trained to breathe the primary, and to donate the octopus, and many have been conditioned to FEAR the idea of removing their mouthpiece/primary from their mouth during a dive... what you are suggesting, is not all that far from me going out and saying " diving is so easy, you dont need no stinking instruction--just grab the gear and dive..." The thing is, even though some of us here would have been fine doing just that, the majority of divers out there, really were in desparate need of good instruction, in order to be safe in the ocean. As to your son, you already told us he "learned on" the Air II, which means he was actually trained on this system, and felt it comfortable to donate the primary....In this, his training was more similar to what we do for DIR development....including the part where you say he practiced and drilled with the Air II--again, something we believe in as important...Kudos to you and your son for the insight to do this.

My son was trained using an AirII, and it was literally "give the OOA diver your primary, and breathe the AirII". At 13 years of age, it was simply a no-brainer for him, and was pretty much the extent of training he needed. He could have been told that over the counter, and would have still been ok with its use. The same points Dan makes about an AirII could also be made about using a 7' hose. Are we to condemn that configuration as well?

Whoaa! The huge difference here is that we NEVER tell divers to start using the DIR gear, without someone to either "mentor them" into the gear, or instruct them in it, or if you go back to the early days of DIR in the late 90's, we had huge articles , threads and pdf's for divers to download, to learn how to configure, how to use, and how to drill....and the "how to drill" was always pushed...

...Where is the "always drill " with the Air II suggestions to buy and use this?

 

[James R]

I disagree here, becauase most of the open water students have been trained to breathe the primary, and to donate the octopus, and many have been conditioned to FEAR the idea of removing their mouthpiece/primary from their mouth during a dive...

This, in my opinion, is a training issue not an equipment choice problem. However, I will agree with you that it's important. My local LDS rental/class ScubaPro BCDs have Air2 on them (as do most they sell IIRC), thus the students are taught how to use it right off.

What happens when they go to Cozumel and rent gear with a regular octo? They may not know what to do, don't think to ask, and no drills are done.

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I still contend that common sense should tell a diver to not donate an Air2 as it also is used to control the donor's buoyancy, but common sense seems to be the least common of the senses.

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When I go out on the boat as the DM, I always brief any new (to me or new in general) dive buddy how I will donate my long hose to them should there be an issue. I also ask if they are familiar with their gear or is it their first time to use it and go over their out of air process. This has paid off in a big way when an AOW student was sitting at 62' with under 200psi, his instructor signaled to me he was low, so I handed him my primary and we made a nice easy ascent up the mooring line. He said the only bad thing was my seacure molded mouthpiece in his mouth, which to me is a small price to pay for air.

 

[danvolker]

That one got me too. To be honest, if I were to assist an OOA diver, (assuming we are talking about recreational diving) I doubt I would even do a "safety stop" unless that diver has become perfectly calm and even then I don't know that I would do it. I would think that all that person would care about is reaching the surface, getting that mask off, and taking a deep breath of fresh air. As long as we had a reasonable rate of accent, I see no real need to do a safety stop in that situation.

If I am helping a new OOA diver, and the ascent was at a safe rate, a safety stop is not really anything needed in the scenario...we are going up, slowly, from a dive that has a "no stop" profile.

The point about the body position during offgassing, it an issue when major saturation has occurred, and the offgassing portion of the dive is being used to "OPTIMALLY" filter bubbles out of the blood.
This comes from a theory of "Hydrostatic Lung Loading", which has been used with spectacular results on tens of thousands of man/hours on huge deco dives, where the belief is that blood will NOT effectively be filtered in a vertical position during deco, because the pressure difference in the vertical plane causes much more of the human lung to be insufficiently functional---that because of the shape of the human lungs, the horizontal plane allows better bloodflow throughout the lungs underwater, and more optimal bubble filtering will take place.

So I see it as a theory, that I and many of my friends have used to execute many thousands of 200 to 300 foot deep dives, for our decompression on ascents.....and with results of perfect deco/perfect health on the surface afterward, far beyond the norm for traditional deco practices in a vertical position. I have used this for accelerated deco's many times, and been completely clean and without bubbling afterward ( by dopplers). I feel this is more effective, but I can only say that I think this is the best theory....if you want to discount it, fine....but I don't think you should go so far as to ridicule it, because it has been used with far less incidence of DCS than competing vertical position deco's.

 

[BDSC]

I feel this is more effective, but I can only say that I think this is the best theory....if you want to discount it, fine....but I don't think you should go so far as to ridicule it, because it has been used with far less incidence of DCS than competing vertical position deco's.

I'm not ridiculing anything here. You seem to be now talking about doing 200 to 300 ft dives and doing "deco" stops. I'm not sure that's what any of this was about until now I guess. I was just saying that I don't know that I would do a "Safety Stop" if I was helping an OOA diver in "Recreation Diving" as my post said.

 

[TSandM]

Wow -- I don't like Air2s, but I have to admit that reading some of the things that have been written here makes ME wince.

I do think Dan has a good point about comfort without a regulator in the mouth, but I think that for two reasons -- one, I help teach classes and watch students, and two, I had the same issue myself after my OW class. If I HAD to remove my regulator, I was extremely anxious and desperate to put something back in my mouth immediately -- I would not have been comfortable (in fact, I WASN'T comfortable at the beginning) doing a primary donate, especially if I had had to fumble at all for a backup.

And, years after I discarded the Air2, I had an embarrassing and scary experience in my own swimming pool. My husband and I were practicing the gear exchange for my DM class. He uses a SeaQuest Balance with an Air2 for his pool setup, and I started out in his gear. We were buddy breathing, and as I went to take the equipment off, I lost my balance and fell over. He had the regulator at that point, and I believe I had my mask off. At any rate, I couldn't see where he had gone, and I was pretty CO2 loaded from having been buddy-breathing for a while, so I didn't have a lot of tolerance for not breathing. I went for the Air2, and, unable to see, I couldn't immediately figure it out, which added to my discomfort. Bottom line, I ended up close to panic in the bottom of my own pool, largely from CO2 retention. When we ended the exercise, I came up spluttering and saying, "I HATE that thing . . .!" Which is not a condemnation of the Air2, but definitely a story illustrating that its use may not be intuitive, if the person who owns it has not practiced with it.

I don't think anybody is going to be hurt by ascending vertically while sharing gas, although I think such ascents are harder to control and more task-loading of the divers. I'm quite sure it is safe and probably desirable to omit a safety stop when doing an air-sharing ascent with someone who does not practice such things regularly (and those people are very unlikely to run out of gas, anyway). I think worrying about the difference between vertical and horizontal decompression efficiency at the end of a no-stop dive in an air-sharing situation is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think one can probably hook an elbow around an ascent line, if that's necessary. You can manage it all. I just don't really understand why anyone would WANT to. There are so many minor disadvantages of the setup, and only one minor advantage. It doesn't pencil out for me, but then again, diving is very much to each his own. I certainly wouldn't have any issues diving with someone who used one, so long as I had assurances that they had practiced with it.

 

[BennyM]

When a diver is out of air, he will grab the ONLY thing that he sees in front of him delivering air, the primary second stage in the donor's MOUTH. Nothing else!!

I use a 42" hose for my primary that runs under my right arm and an AirII for alternate. I have absolutely NO problem whatsoever with using AirII including ease of breathing and/or inflating/deflating the BC. I used this setup with a diver that wasn't my buddy but who ran out of air and found me and grabbed my primary SS. Folks who have a thing against AirII seem to be working very hard to dream up unreal scenarios and arguments to support their unreasonable claims. Give it a rest.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

But is that really necessary? A special training program to use an AIR II? Just how complicated does anyone need to make this?

How about this. A guy comes into a dive shop to buy some gear and decides to buy a bc system with and AIR II even though he has never used one. The shop owner simply tells that person that the one thing he needs to do differently with this system is, if he is faced with a buddy who is OOA, then he would need to donate his primary to the OOA diver and then breathe off his AIR II. Maybe he could suggest the person practice that one time with a buddy at a pool or on his next dive trip. All this would be about what.......a 10 to 15 minute investment in time.

Of course the shop owner would actually need to remember to tell the diver this info but what more would need to be done. It's really pretty basic stuff it seems.

The problem is that most folks won't retain a skill by doing it one time ... they need to do it fairly regularly. Diving ain't like riding a bicycle ... it doesn't just come back to you ... particularly if the skill is one you would use in a stressful situation where people won't be thinking clearly or reacting predictably.

I don't think you need a training program ... you need a mindset that it's a good idea to practice your emergency skills from time to time, so that if you should ever need them you'll have the confidence to use them as intended.

That's not a particularly difficult thing to do ... all it takes is a couple minutes during the dive, and the decision to do it.

FWIW - safety stop's a great time to practice skills ... you're in shallow water, and you're gonna be there for a few minutes anyway ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I'll say it again...all the "problems" to which Dan refers has to do with training, not the gear. There is really no "specialized" training needed to properly use an AirII. My son was trained using an AirII, and it was literally "give the OOA diver your primary, and breathe the AirII". At 13 years of age, it was simply a no-brainer for him, and was pretty much the extent of training he needed. He could have been told that over the counter, and would have still been ok with its use. The same points Dan makes about an AirII could also be made about using a 7' hose. Are we to condemn that configuration as well? The same point can be made for almost any piece of gear out there if just handed to a new diver and wished "good luck". I see fabricated, imaginary what-if's being proposed left and right in here in an attemtp to denegrate the AirII, along with a few supposed advanced divers making up horror stories about how difficult they imagine an AirII is to use in a given scenario...and again, I just have to LMAO, because evidently my 15-year old son is light years ahead of them if they would have so much trouble using such a simple piece of gear. Personally, I don't care what configuration any given diver chooses to dive, but a lot of the crap I've read in this thread is just plain balderdash.

As someone who has specialized in training young people over the years, I'd just like to point out that your 13-year old is very likely to pick up on new techniques quite a bit faster than the typical 33-year old ... they have less preconceptions to muddle through. That's one reason I so very much enjoy training kids ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[BennyM]

The problem is that most folks won't retain a skill by doing it one time ... they need to do it fairly regularly. Diving ain't like riding a bicycle ... it doesn't just come back to you ... particularly if the skill is one you would use in a stressful situation where people won't be thinking clearly or reacting predictably.

I don't think you need a training program ... you need a mindset that it's a good idea to practice your emergency skills from time to time, so that if you should ever need them you'll have the confidence to use them as intended.

That's not a particularly difficult thing to do ... all it takes is a couple minutes during the dive, and the decision to do it.

FWIW - safety stop's a great time to practice skills ... you're in shallow water, and you're gonna be there for a few minutes anyway ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Are you implying that AirII use is more rocket science than using Octo. where one would need more practice with it than Octo.? Your statement applies to just about everything we do in diving.