Rebreather Certification Numbers Released to the Public

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HowardE

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In a historic event this morning, ANDI, IANTD, and TDI released training numbers showing the number of certified Rebreather divers worldwide. The three agencies are undoubtedly the 3 largest Rebreather training agencies worldwide. This historic joining of forces to share this data is truly a first for the diving industry. They combined are assuming they collectively make up more than 90% of the current Rebreather certifications, while practical logic, and from my unbiased reality check, I’d say they’re being conservative, and realistically they probably make up more than 95% of the worldwide Rebreather certifications.

IANTD first started training and certifying Rebreather divers in 1990, and this begins the overall timeframe for Rebreather diving in the public domain.

This data is covering all of the major production Rebreather units available. This doesn't include home-made Rebreathers.

Between 1990 and 1995 was statistically insignificant, whereas there were less than 1000 certifications.

Slightly more than 30,000 divers certified on 27 different types of Rebreathers at varying levels from 1995 to the present. This number is for basic certification, and carries only a 1% duplication rate of divers between the three agencies, as they compared data. On average, this boils down to 1852 divers per year certified in the developmental years of 1996 through the present. This scale is obviously increasing as we reach today, since Rebreather diving now is at an all time high, and marketing of Rebreathers has greatly increased since the 2000's. This overall number is defined as basic CCR/SCR diving. This is further defined as no stop (no decompression) diving, at depths not exceeding 30 meters.
CCR numbers have grown steadily but have experienced rapid growth over the past 3 years (2009 through 2010).

Projections indicate that in the following years, they expect trending to proceed on a higher scale, whereas as many as 3000 divers per year will become Rebreather certified.
 
The agencies need to keep working cooperativly like they did here regardless on how difficult the task may be.. Gathering certification numbers and information from all regional hq withing an agency can be a daunting task.. Nowadays sorting through data is not a bad , but going through and looking for all the records from the early days can be daunting.. I am glad people have embraced the info that was supplied that makes me feel the time spent was well worth the effort...
 
Even with PADI getting in the game, cost is still one of the biggest inhibitors to the sport rebreather diver. I will be writing up several topics in the Rebreather forum on SB for us (SB members) to discuss some of the topics and conclusions from RF3 among this group.

It is also my firm belief that the remainder of the Scuba Industry should take away some key elements from the rebreather community. There were several topics and conclusions that were specific to rebreathers (since it was a Rebreather Forum) that are applicable to the rest of the scuba industry.

The conclusion on certification numbers was this:

The forum applauds and endorses the release of pooled data describing numbers of Rebreather certifications by training agencies and encourages other agencies to join ANDI, IANTD, and TDI in this initiative

I'll say this... would it not be beneficial for us as scuba divers to also understand the total number of diver certs? How can we truly calculate incident rates, and safety statistics without this KEY piece of data??
 
This is a hugely important step in the right direction. Untill we find out why rebreather divers are dying at a staggeringly higher rate than OC we need to sift through every crumb of data we can get.
Thanks Joe and all the other underpaid slobs from the agencies that made this information available.
Now lets go dive safe everyone.
 

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