is Sidemount diving more safe?

[Stunni]

Having to buy two spaces on a boat with a widemount. SideMount 0, Backmount 1.

For the record: I wasn’t trying to start a flame war, just wanted to point out that each configuration mitigates different risks and one is not inherently safer than the other…

the boats i ever were: the SMlers hide in the rear somewhere fiddling stupid Cordura stuff (me, 3XL while broad BMs clog the entrys, companions and alleys with all their food and gadgets and excitement chatting about coloured seafood or her marriage dive holidays at Maldives......

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remember my first real proud moment as a diving father, when my OWD Girl age 14 entered the ladder to a croatian floating coffin. fully mounted she tried to enter deck when an austrian wellformed Mermaid plugging the whole entry groaned why she can´t be more canny... she blaffed her quite loud back, sorry, but i am back from diving... you should have seen the austrian wife husband laughing.
Now came the moment i was really proud. another older Austrian diver... grumpy the whole way to the dive spot, first in and just out, deco gases and dry suit already hung up... got up from his place, helped her gently with the BCD and tank. We had a very nice way back to harbour... it turned out that he was an old Instructor trainer from Graz... nice chatting about weather, gods, divesport
so, sidemounts are more philantropist when hide in the back
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[SlugLife]

For the record: I wasn’t trying to start a flame war

My posts were meant to be dry-humor. Or would joking about scuba be wet-humor?

 

[Stunni]

My posts were meant to be dry-humor. Or would joking about scuba be wet-humor?

 

[Stunni]

for dry-humor you need specialty.... please load your certification onto your next international premium finance-oriented brevet provider server.
if you need a server upload specialty, please load your credit card number...

 

[MSargeant]

Such an effort would be much more than an Eve Online spreadsheet.

Ah, I miss the days of crunching numbers in EFT to squeeze the most EHP and DPS while keeping things affordable (Pirate life). Those were the good old days.

To the OP: Probably not, though it's a good option for those with bad joints/who struggle with the weight of doubles.

 

[Stunni]

one more from the point of welling

after years in SM i changed for 2 dives my Apeks WSX-25 with a Buddy who wanted to try.
Red sea, nice bay... nice waves... i encountered in his $pro Seahawk that i never missed the rolling in such a BCD. in SM Setup - even Monkey style - you only get swayed within the wave. theres no lever like the bombola does to you... rollin´rollin ´rollin

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[rjack321]

Plenty of folks have drowned running out of gas in SM. The Calimba accident that @Norwegian Cave Diver wrote up is a good example. Whenever someone says anything is "safer" another idiot is born to prove them wrong.

 

[Norwegian Cave Diver]

Plenty of folks have drowned running out of gas in SM. The Calimba accident that @Norwegian Cave Diver wrote up is a good example. Whenever someone says anything is "safer" another idiot is born to prove them wrong.

Dont like the term "another idiot. Not a fair assessment of the divers that passed away in Calamba or the mistake(s) they made - in my opinion.
Everybody diving in any configuration in varying conditions make mistakes. I would never think of someone as "an idiot'. I may not understand why they made their decisions, but I will never be disrespectful of them.

 

[Germie]

Dont like the term "another idiot. Not a fair assessment of the divers that passed away in Calamba or the mistake(s) they made - in my opinion.
Everybody diving in any configuration in varying conditions make mistakes. I would never think of someone as "an idiot'. I may not understand why they made their decisions, but I will never be disrespectful of them.

Exactly. And, they would not have been runned out of gas if it was an open water site. This sad accident has nothing to do with sidemount or backmount.

The 2 times I rescued people out of a cave was in 1 time backmount and in 1 time sidemount. What went wrong had in 1 case to do with no guideline, in the other case with just bad luck and a broken line in zero viz, someone else broke the line on the way out when they were still in the cave. They found an airbell. The reason I could go to look for them was because I was on a rebreather.
So if you want to talk about safety in a cave, a rebreather does not run out of gas as fast as open circuit. But also a ccr had its own problems to deal with.
Also you can start an discussion if touch contact is safer than bump and go.
But these techniques are used in backmount, sidemount and ccr.

But if you want to dive oc and a twinset fits, go for it. Does sidemount fits better, go for it. At the end, gas is gas.

 

[Norwegian Cave Diver]

I *am* a research statistician, with an expertise in experimental design. SlugLife is correct here; as multiple folks have pointed out, there's not a sufficient sample size to draw any reasonable conclusions, and the list of potential confounds is so long that even if you were to find an effect, it could be due to any number of causes - some of which we can measure and (partially) control for, and some of which we can't.

The only real way to know would be to assemble a very very large group (you'd need a huge sample given the low baserate of deaths/incidents) of divers trained in both SM and BM, who would be willing to be randomly assigned by a researcher to do their dives in SM vs BM for a given stretch of time. (You could also randomly assign per dive, which would increase statistical power, but also add enormous logistical complexity). Then see whether more of the divers in the BM condition have accidents/incidents than those in the SM condition. I highly doubt any ethics board would even approve that study (i.e., could end up randomly assigning someone to dive a SM-only cave in BM), and even if they did, there's almost certainly not any way to get the sample size/level of compliance you'd need for causal inference.

Some questions are just not very amenable to being answered empirically; a similar problem exists (for example) for whether any level of diving is safe during pregnancy. The number of women diving while pregnant is so low, and complications rare enough, that the published literature has more or less concluded that it's unlikely we will ever have the sample size to allow us to statistically determine the risk (and whether any safe limits exist). The best we can do is draw on animal studies, and our theoretical knowledge of physiology and how diving could affect that in pregnancy. The same approach is the best that can be taken here; there may be theoretical arguments for SM vs BM, but it's unlikely we'll ever have sufficient data to test those arguments empirically.

And, as I like to tell my students: the plural of anecdote is not "data".

Unfortunately your statement of needing data to determine if Sidemount with two tanks vs Backmount doubles - what is safer - isn’t correct.

No data is required at all.

Only an explanation of a valve drill for a set of back mount doubles vs Sidemount.

In one example you reach behind your head and work 3 valves you can’t look and see vs two valves you can look at and see and can reach easily. In Sidemount if I had a free flowing regulator I can quickly identify what regulator I am breathing from and shut down that valve only. Then I have the easy opportunity to throttle that valve open, with a free flowing regulator, take a breath and easily close the valve again until I’m ready for another breath, repeat and exit. Don’t need any data, just a quick comparison and the answer is obvious.
Now there are going to be some hard core defenders of backmount doubles. Examples like backmount doubles are safer in a wreck - and I will agree with that, but not in a cave, or in open water.