Diveco says fine for me to fly 4-ish hours after a dive

[bleeb]

If the plane violently decompresses at 30,000+', who isn't getting bent?

Exactly. There's a reason that Oxygen masks are provided rather than Air.

Um, don't know if that was a serious comment or an off-the-cuff witticism but, not quite. Oxygen masks on planes are mainly so that people don't pass out and/or get brain damage. At altitude, depending on how fast the pressure drops, some people may have as little as 15-30 sec of consciousness, which is one of the reasons why in-flight briefings always say to put on your own mask before helping others. And it can take several minutes for the pilots to get the plane down to a breathable altitude.

As for whether rapid decompression in an airplane is likely or not to cause DCS, I asked a similar question a while back and got some very useful response. One in particular pointed to some papers which I think were in the Rubicon Archive describing some NASA research. (Those might actually have been by our own Dr Deco.) I've misplaced the exact reference, but the concern was for astronauts who frequently dive in the training tanks in Houston and then have to fly back to Florida the same day on military trainers, which have pressurization problems much more often than commercial passenger aircraft. IIRC, the conclusion was that the combination of size of the pressure drop (roughly half an atmosphere) and duration before recompression (a few minutes to fly back down to lower altitudes) generally didn't result in any major DCS issues.

 

[Blackwood]

It was in jest.

 

[bleeb]

It was in jest.

:doh:

 

[String]

If the plane violently decompresses at 30,000+', who isn't getting bent?

Nobody. You're going to about 3/4 of an atmosphere or in other words about 7m. It also takes a minute or 2 to decompress. So its the same as going to the surface from 7m depth in about a minute. Something people with no abnormal N2 loading would hve a problem with at all.