CosbySweater
Contributor
You gotta watch it when you make sweeping generalizations based on your own subjective and personal experiences.
What @CosbySweater wrote is simply not true. Several assumptions are made that don't follow a logical thought process.
I've got almost 500 dives on air integration, my buddy has 140, with no failures. So I could post that air integration is extremely reliable.
If your non-AI computer fails, you might have to abort the dive anyway depending on your no decompression limits, and you'd lose all your nitrogen and oxygen data from an extended dive trip (if applicable of course) and that applies to both air integrated and non air integrated setups.
I had a wrist receiver flood (I don't count this as an air integrated malfunction) and I continued the dive but stayed close to my buddy in the event that I would need to use their gas, but I always have a good idea of how much gas I have remaining so I can fairly accurately estimate dive time remaining. Worst case scenario my reg breathes hard at the safety stop and I cut the dive short and surface and attach my good old SPG that is currently sitting in my gear bag. I've had it on and off my first stage several times and finally decided not to bother with it anymore.
So a dive doesn't necessarily have to be aborted with a computer failure of any sort.
I too spend a lot of time underwater and I prefer to have all the information right there on my wrist without dragging an extra hose and set of gauges, it makes diving that much more enjoyable for me and if I HAD to abort a dive due to the extremely low possibility of an AI failure and no other option to extend the dive, it would still be worth it to lose one dive out of 100s in exchange for the convenience of wrist mounted AI.
TBH, the original question is silly. Everyone has different levels of risk they will accept on a particular dive. If an AI fails on a shallow dive, in good viz, at a familiar site, with a trusted buddy then it doesn't necessarily mean the dive should be aborted. It depends on the divers experience and comfort with the situation. My incident happened while I was solo drifting in relatively deep water. Had it not been for a backup gauge, the dive (and the day) would have been over for me. That's me though. Others may be different. I like to dive with redundancy for that reason though.
The issue with my Suunto transmitter is not exclusive to me. There are others (on SB no less) that have experienced the same issue with Suunto transmitters. So, the issue I highlighted extends beyond my personal experience so it's not a sweeping generalization. Yes, transmitters are reliable, but they have more potential points of failure than a simple SPG does. Redundancy is important to me and my config works for me. You dive you.