A deep systemic problem with diver ed?

I initially posted this in another thread but it was a little off-topic and liable to get lost in the noise.

There are a number of threads running at the moment that allude to the poor quality of diver training - some are about behavior problems, others - unfortunately - are about serious accidents. Some of them indict the instructor, others the student. My feeling is that there is a root cause that is a much bigger problem - the commercial structure of diver education is completely and hopelessly flawed.

The primary problem is that commercial pressure is entirely dominating 'acceptable' practice. There are two key components to this:

1. All of the diver ed marketing, as well as the course structures, are geared to the assumption of getting certified for a price. This fixed price certification model forces the training process into a very short and inflexible time frame.

2. The training and certifying agency has an excessivley strong commercial incentive to make sure everyone 'succeeds'.

Let's compare this with flight training (another relatively high risk activity). When you enter a flight school there is absolutely no assumption that you will become a pilot. There is also no assumption that it will take x hours (a student that we know of at one of the local flight schools has done more than 200hrs of a 40hr requirement). You pay for the hours - not the licence.

There are a number of key structural differences:

- Training standards are externally regulated
- Examiners are not from flight schools
- flight schools (in almost all cases) have no expectation of selling successful students a plane.

Even driver training follows the same basic model of external regulation and no commercial conflict of interest.

The sad reality (to me) is that the commercial pressures on dive schools to crank out 'divers' and sell gear are so powerful that the idea of self regulation is completely ridiculous. I do not think diver training will become truly effective or safe until there is clear independent (probably federal) regulation.

My CMAS scuba training in France was carried out under this schema, with external federal examiners, and it was VERY tough. There was no completion date and no assumption of success.

I think it is pointless to blame the instructors (or the students). Some will deal better with it than others but, in the current environment, instructors can only do so much. There is a lot of pressure on them to 'efficiently' deliver dive gear and dive trip consumers. I think they and the sport of diving (not to mention the reefs...) need some outside help.

with the flight training analogy, IMHO, is that no one learns to fly just enough to go vacation or holiday in the Carribean or some other similar area. The truth in scuba diving is most people only want to know enough to make one or two trips under water. This doesn't require planning, gas management or any real skill.

Now just imagine the vacation pilot wannabe strolling into the FBO and announcing I want to take six flight lessons so I'll know enough to fly around the island on my vacation.

A diver goes to 100 feet and suddenly the fecal material travels through the fan. Diver bolts for the surface and will more than likely live to tell about it after departing the chamber and will likely dive again.

A "pilot" takes off and gets to 100 feet when the fecal material hits the prop. Aircraft crashes-- "pilot" dies. Little chance to fly again.

In both activities, quality training, followed by lots of practice make both really quite low risk endeavors.

If I get into a plane and crash it I am at least somewhat likely to hit (and kill or injure) someone on the ground.

The loss is not just mine.

If I get in the water and drown due to lack of training the death is uniquely mine. THe odds of me dragging an unconnected party into the morass are somewhere between slim and zero.

There is zero justification for "licensing" divers for this reason. It is arguable that such is reasonable for pilots, because when the plane comes down, whatever is under it has a tendency to get squashed (at best).

I agree that flying is more unforgiving of gross errors than diving. Bad divers who do stupid things generally live to tell about it. Not so for bad pilots.

But Grajan is not saying that flight training is just like dive training. The point is that the success of flight instructors in training students is not judged by the instructors. Success is measured by an outside government agency that has the power to prevent students from participating in the activity until they meet objective standards of competence. This is not the case for diving. The economic pressures of the industry are exactly the opposite. Standards of competency are low, and stay low, because there is no economic incentive to make them any higher.

Society does not want to live with incompetent pilots in the air. Fundamentally, this is because when bad pilots kill themselves, they have a substantial chance of also killing innocent bystanders who may have nothing to do with flying. The question is, can society live with low standards of competence for divers? I think, as much as I hate to say it, that it can. Incompetent divers have a low risk of killing themselves. When they have fatal accidents, they usually kill only themselves. If they kill someone else, it is another diver, i.e., someone participating in the activity and not a random bystander.

As much as I would like to see the standards of dive instruction go up, I don't think that we will ever see a government agency analogous to the FAA regulating diver training. If you want to learn to be a better diver, you will have to seek out better training on your own. If you don't care, or don't know better training exists, that's your problem.

WJL once bubbled...
I agree that flying is more unforgiving of gross errors than diving. Bad divers who do stupid things generally live to tell about it. Not so for bad pilots.


As much as I would like to see the standards of dive instruction go up, I don't think that we will ever see a government agency analogous to the FAA regulating diver training. If you want to learn to be a better diver, you will have to seek out better training on your own. If you don't care, or don't know better training exists, that's your problem.

Click to expand...

I don't feel the desire for the protective "Big Brother" of a government telling me how to dive. If I do something stupid and pay for it, it is my fault. If I do something that I don't have the training for, knowing that it is beyond my level, that is my fault.

It took long enough for the sport to advance as it is. The recreational agencies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting Nitrox. The agencies didn't want to hear talk about cave diving, wreck penetrations, and deco diving (excuse me, diving outside of NDL's). I have learned a great deal from advanced wreck and cave divers that I apply to my open water skills. Why should that be outlawed.

Anyone familiar with the US gov't will tell you that they add about another 10-20 yrs. at a minimum with their studies prior to approving anything. If it were up to the US gov't, we would still be in "Sea Hunt" gear as it was proven to work and they wouldn't want to do the research to legislate the upgrades. Either that, or they would rush in because an idea looked neat and require it on all scuba gear and in training classes to further raise the cost of our training and possibly force people to not be able to take SCUBA classes that might otherwise be able to. The United States Federal Gov't isn't necessarily a villian in everything, but they aren't the model of balance in their decisions. We are still better off policing ourselves. We don't need "Big Brother" doing it for us.

The instructer still has the incurred obligation to train you to the best of your ability. If your abilty is not good enough a card should not be issued. If a improperly trained diver dies to lack of instructer ethics, IMHO it is the instructer that killed him.

is that an outside examiner would insure that all new scuba divers, the divers that are the most ignorant and the most at risk at least start out with a firm hold on the basics.

It has been said over and over again, and I agree, that the training, good or bad, is determined by the quality of the instructor. This will always be the case, but at least with someone else doing the check-out dives it will remove the "pay to play" certifications and even the bad instructors will actually have to turn out a diver that can and will perform the necessary skills to hold the certification. That way the percentage of students passing actually means something instead of letting people pass to keep the numbers up.

Here's another analogy, for what it's worth, in dog ownership you can have a good dog or a bad dog. Good dogs can pass what's called a Canine Good Citizen test and they get a nifty certificate that proves they are a good dog. The examiner is payed a fee to evaluate the dog in a variety of circumstances to see if it meets the criteria.

I agree that federal involvement might be a little more regulation than the sport demands, and the instrutor/certifier model isn't likely to change anytime soon. So what if there was a performance based test/card that I diver could hold that would be more a show of skills and allow analysis from an unbiased source?

Thats me babbling again..... enjoy!

Rachel

Grajan once bubbled...

My feeling is that there is a root cause that is a much bigger problem - the commercial structure of diver education is completely and hopelessly flawed.

The primary problem is that commercial pressure is entirely dominating 'acceptable' practice. There are two key components to this:

1. All of the diver ed marketing, as well as the course structures, are geared to the assumption of getting certified for a price. This fixed price certification model forces the training process into a very short and inflexible time frame.

2. The training and certifying agency has an excessivley strong commercial incentive to make sure everyone 'succeeds'.

The sad reality (to me) is that the commercial pressures on dive schools to crank out 'divers' and sell gear are so powerful that the idea of self regulation is completely ridiculous. I do not think diver training will become truly effective or safe until there is clear independent (probably federal) regulation.

My CMAS scuba training in France was carried out under this schema, with external federal examiners, and it was VERY tough. There was no completion date and no assumption of success.

I think it is pointless to blame the instructors (or the students). Some will deal better with it than others but, in the current environment, instructors can only do so much. There is a lot of pressure on them to 'efficiently' deliver dive gear and dive trip consumers. I think they and the sport of diving (not to mention the reefs...) need some outside help.

Click to expand...

I'm completely speechless at your presumtions.

"Completely and hopelessly flawed"?

First, diving is an obnoxiously safe endevor, especially compared with other high risk sports like rock climbing and sky diving.

Secondly, diving accidents and injuries have been in a steady per capita decline for over thirty years, even though agencies have -obviously- "dumbed down" standards to bare minimums.

And this is market driven by the consumer, not the agencies.

And anyone concerned with minimum training standards, such as minimum age, for instance, should know who sets these standards, and it's not the agencies (sorry, PADI bashers).

Learn what the WRSTC is, and what they do.

The number of diving fatalities every year are so miniscule, as to be difficult to even create probabilities.

Third, the average American would show little or no interest in going through a CMAS ar BSAC structured diving environment.

It simply takes too long for someone who wants to dive one or two weekends a year.

BSAC's injury statistics parallel DAN's in causuality, at any rate.

OW classes, anybody's, go for around $4-500 inland, and no one will pay twice that for twice the instruction.

Unless you expect already starving instructors to absorb these costs.

If your LDS tries to shove gear down your throat, find another one.

Run, don't walk.

I've never seen this happen, myself.

There are 8 -million- certified divers in the U.S. alone, with PADI alone cranking out 200K more per year, where is this big pile of bodies we keep hearing about?

What ever standards are, dumbed down or otherwise, they're obviously sufficient for the average person to survive on.

This is also an indication that previous levels of training may well have been unnecessarily intensive, for the trends in diving style we see today (read: vacation diver).

What, actually, does the average diver need to know how to calculate SAC rate for, exactly?

That's also why you see little or no body count from Resort Courses, the 90 minute certification.

Additional training is readily available for anyone that wants it.

No Open Water student is ready for the Andrea Doria right out of class, not even in CMAS.

Different stepped levels of training are an absolute necessity.

Lastly, I can't imagine any more government oversite, by those nice bureaucrats that brought you Amtrak and the Social Security system.

Non-divers at that.

Talk about revenue driven structures, you better brace yourself for any governing body.

It all boils down to the individual diver's responibility.

Here's a ferinstance that -defies belief-.

I was in a well known Panama City dive shop yesterday, and listened to the counter help tell two divers that there was no need to analyze their NITROX tanks, which were already on the boat, because they had a membrane system.

Now, frankly, anyone who's certified to use nitrox should have absolutely no problem with what to do in this situation.

I'm proud to announce that both divers in my presence haughtily announced they had their own analyzers, and would use them.

But how many other divers didn't?

And, bottom line, who's fault was that?

Not the agency, not the instructor, not even the dirt bag dive operator, but...

The diver.

And I'm afraid you can't train Darwin away.

Grajan once bubbled...

Even driver training follows the same basic model of external regulation and no commercial conflict of interest.

Click to expand...

About 40,000 people die every year in the USA in auto accidents.
I am willing to bet that more died in plane crashes last year than died while diving. What EXACTLY is the problem? IMHO, the problem is that you are annoyed at the skill level of divers you see out there. And for THAT you want government regulation of diving? I agree that diver education isn't what it could be. There are instructors around that couldn't teach fish to swim, but that's not enough reason to get outside agencies involved. Find a way to improve dive INSTRUCTOR training.

Popeye: I don't try to "train away" Darwin, I train 'em FOR Murphy

Peace,
Neil

I guess I had better jump back in. The message I am clearly getting is:

1. NO goverment regulation under any circumstances - I'm hardly suprised by that.

2. There is not a problem - This takes a little more swallowing givent the preponderance of threads that in some way complain about dangerously unskilled divers.

3. As long as they are only killing themselves it does not matter - I have to differ on this one, although I must say I am astonished at society's tolerance for death by motor vehicle so this may well be the prevailing view.

Sure - The flying analogy is imperfect. Analogies always are. It was meant to be illustrative of a similar system WITH checks and balances.

As for my being annoyed by the divers around me. I am sufficiently anti-social to generally either charter my own boat or shore dive to avoid other divers so that has little impact on me.

My interest is actually more academic. I often work in the area of why management systems fail. I read lots of threads complaining about training standards but shooting at the symptoms not the root cause.

The way I see it this is a systemic problem - a classic case of overwhelming commercial drivers pointing in the opposite direction to the (superficial) goals. The diving industry is heavily incentivized to apply absolutely minimal standards and to 'train' as rapidly as possible. There are no checks and balances in the current system at all. It is designed to fail. The idea of 'self regulation' in these circumstances is laughable.

In fact, I kind of feel sorry for the instructors. They are generally trying to maintain high standards with the whole system pushing against them. "Don't fail them - they won't buy gear", "Don't spend too much time they are paying a fixed price".

IF there is even a problem (apparently arguable) and if govt regulation is not the answer (probably true) has somebody else got a more creative idea? Because beating up on instructors or students is missing the point and not going to fix anything.

Or maybe, as the tone of many of the replies suggests, we should all stop even getting upset by dead or injured divers and put it down to the price to be paid for efficient commerce.