What happens if you come up unconscious with a wing-style BC?

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The nomenclature of Horse collar would have been impossible to market to the diving community . but now it evokes
the daring do of yesteryear and is prized by the current vintage & double hose aficionados.
Over here, it's lovingly known as a crapper lid :)
 
I loved my old ScubaPro Stabilizing Jacket. Used it for two decades until it was thread-bare and unusable. Picked this one up the other day for $10 that I am going to fool around with. The second pic is me back in the late 80's (I think) with my all-time favorite jacket in my "Orange Phase." Always kept me upright on the surface. Mark

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A couple days ago my buddy was taking a little extra time getting ready on the shore, and I casually lay back on the surface, quitely relaxing while he was making his final preparations. I was wearing my customary BP/W. I started thinking about this thread and how what I was casually and easily doing was supposedly impossible.

Yeah, I have almost fallen asleep on my back at the surface @ the end of a dive. After someone frantically asked me if I was okay once, I started to slowly spin around (watching the clouds and birds) at the end of dives so as not to alarm people. I cannot fathom going face-down without effort.
 
A couple days ago my buddy was taking a little extra time getting ready on the shore, and I casually lay back on the surface, quitely relaxing while he was making his final preparations. I was wearing my customary BP/W. I started thinking about this thread and how what I was casually and easily doing was supposedly impossible.

John, surely you don't mean to extrapolate your experience to conclude that, because it works for you (presumably in freshwater and perhaps with steel twins and a drysuit), it works for everyone? You're better than that.

Hello everyone
I am in the process of choosing a new (travel) BC, and the first consideration is jacket vs wing. I love the feeling of the wing from my little tech diving experience BUT I read in various places that one of the disadvantages of the wing is that you have to work to keep your head above the water at the surface as the wing is pushing you into an horizontal position head down.

I dive a BP&W more or less all the time except when I'm checking out extra gear that I keep around for other people etc.

Despite what some very experienced divers will tell you, there is a tendency for a BP&W to push the diver face-forward to a greater extent than with jacket BCs. Whether the effect is present or not, and is severity, depends on configuration.

The face-forward tendency is greatest in the ocean with a relatively buoyant cylinder at the end of a dive. Since many beginning divers find themselves making ocean dives with an AL80, and floating along while waiting for their turn to get on the boat, this is a common situation. With large steel doubles in freshwater, at the beginning of the dive, the distribution of weight and buoyancy does not tend to push the diver forward. Having the cylinder attached relatively low in the cam bands makes matters worse, as does carrying lead in front of the body rather than at the sides or back. A highly buoyant exposure suit will mitigate the effect somewhat.

So, yes, in some configurations it will take more effort to keep your head above water. In some plausible scenarios particularly for beginning divers this could become a serious problem particularly when trying to remain safe at the surface after an emergency especially for someone who has lost (or taken off) one or both fins. Be sure your weight is ditchable. Place your lead at your sides or back rather than in front of you. Be prepared to ditch your kit and be comfortable doing it. Have a snorkel on your mask even though it's not cool.

Once you are accustomed to the effect and comfortable compensating for it, and become more comfortable in the water with your gear generally, it matters a lot less.

So... imagine the dive is going wrong, you've dumped your weights and are getting to the surface half conscious or unconscious. Is that the case of with a wing you die cos' you arrive horizontally head down whereas with a jacket you have more chance of survival?

If you're unconscious or half conscious your only hope is immediate presence of capable rescue and it doesn't matter much what kind of BC you have.

The real problem is panic and task overload. If you arrive at the surface when everything is going wrong all at once, having to devote some effort and thought to keeping your head back and feet forward gives you one more thing to do.
 
John, surely you don't mean to extrapolate your experience to conclude that, because it works for you (presumably in freshwater and perhaps with steel twins and a drysuit), it works for everyone?
I can only attest that it works in saltwater and with a steel single. Albeit in a drysuit, I'll give you that.

In that configuration, I've never been bothered with my wing pushing me face forward. At least not that I've noticed.
 
John, surely you don't mean to extrapolate your experience to conclude that, because it works for you (presumably in freshwater and perhaps with steel twins and a drysuit), it works for everyone? You're better than that.
I bought my first BCD 20 years ago--a back inflate Zeagle Ranger. I happily dived with it for more than 5 years before I finally took the rescue diver course. It was during that course that the instructor informed me that my back inflate BCD put me face forward on the surface. I had never heard that until then, and I had never noticed.

A few years later I was a professional working for the shop, and I got the chance to get good keyman pricing on ScubaPro gear. I got another back inflate BCD, a Nighthawk. I never had any face down experiences with that, either.

Soon I was into tech diving, and I began using BPWs for all my diving. Again, no problems floating comfortably on the surface.

One day I was teaching an advanced class in a swimming pool, and for that class I had a bunch of weights on weight belts on the bottom of the pool for an exercise I was doing. At the end of the session, I had to get it all to the surface, and I did what we teach people not to do--I used my wing as a lift device by filling it to the max while I swam slowly up to the surface with the weight belts. I then put the weight belts on the pool deck. When I turned away with that hyper filled wing, I promptly pitched over on my face. So, yes, it can happen.

I have been diving and teaching diving for two decades, and during that time I have used and seen other people use back inflate BCDs and BP/Ws an untold number of times. The incident in the last paragraph is the only problem I have ever seen.

So, no, I don't have the experience of all the divers in the world. I'm sure there are some who jsut can't handle a back inflate BCD. I just haven't met them yet.
 
So, no, I don't have the experience of all the divers in the world. I'm sure there are some who jsut can't handle a back inflate BCD. I just haven't met them yet.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I would guess that you haven't worked with very many inexperienced divers, in the ocean, in 3mm or less, with an AL80 and a BP/W. Because that's where you'll see it.
 
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I would guess that you haven't worked with very many inexperienced divers, in the ocean, in 3mm or less, with an AL80 and a BP/W. Because that's where you'll see it.
I'd think that you're describing a less common situation than what John and I are describing, globally speaking.

So who's the outlier here?
 
The question was about an unconscious victim at the surface rather than experienced and confident and skilled diver who knows how to lean back and minimize the air in the wing. An unconscious victim may well arrive at the surface with a completely filled bc, since it is reasonable to assume they were not venting on the ascent. As I mentioned previously a scuba pro wrap around air cell has a huge amount of lift and will often support a diver in a head up position at the surface. Edit. Well I didn’t mention the lift capacity before.
 
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