Quote: (Originally Posted by
Janos)
Last summer I was halfway up a mountain when some random paragliding club offered me a lift down to bottom. I took the chance, and left my girlfriend to walk down.
It was brilliant. If I couldn't dive then I would consider taking up paragliding (although not at the moment as one dangerous and expensive sport is enough). However, back at work it turns out that my boss lost a couple of friends a few years back when their canopy collapsed. This is obviously just anecdotal evidence and not statistically significant, but my gut feel is that paragliding is more dangerous.
Mind you, the most dangerous sport in the UK (in terms of fatalities per participant) is actually fishing. Mainly because some people have too many beers and fall overboard, often when having a widdle. Horse riding comes in at number three.
On the OC / CC debate, I think that in the UK, OC is safer to 20m. CC is safer below 40m. Between 20m and 40m is a grey area.
Janos
I am sorry but I simply don't understand how anyone can say that generally a unit is safer than OC.
Providing you have properly serviced regs, what is there to go wrong on an OC dive between 10 and 85m (Flying Enterprise sort of depth)?
You are carrying enough deco gas to meet your planned diveplan so what's the problem with OC and how therefore is Rebreather diving "inherently less dangerous" than OC?
Rebreather divers, very experienced to very inexperienced, are dying because of the failure of their far more complicated diving equipment and it is irrelevant that sometimes those RB divers are causing their own deaths by poor procedures, poor pre-dive checks, poor maintenance etc.
The very nature of a unit requires Rebreather divers to have things like checklists, test sensor performance underwater etc. OC diving is turn on cylinder(s), take a few breaths, check pressure gauges and jump in.
Rebreather's require far more attention than OC, require you the RB diver to be a more educated and capable diver because if you aren't educated and capable a rebreather is far more likely to kill you than an OC system.
Rebreather's seem to regularly have small to not so small things go wrong with them. I won't make a list as there have been so many postings on this site about such instances.
React too slowly, react in the wrong way and hey presto, you're dead!
Oh I do understand that in some failures the Rebreather diver has plenty of time to sort out the problem but OC is so reliable the chances of anything ever going wrong is minuscule.
Last November I "retired" from running Aquanaut Dive Club UK and I have 10 years of data on OC diving and my own 800 OC dives to back up my views. In 10 years we had no DCI, injury or death from virtually exclusively OC diving. The club now has a growing number of Rebreather users and I fear this will change.
I love Rebreather diving and enjoy it far more than OC diving which I only do occasionally on holiday abroad but please let's not kid ourselves that RB diving is less dangerous than OC any more than a motorcycle is less dangerous than a car.
Yes, I agree that in certain specific instances on certain specific dives Rebreather diving might be safer but the thread says "Is RB diving inherently more dangerous than OC?"
How can anyone argue against this if they have read the many posts on fatalities and what brings them about? An ex-club member of ours died on a 24m dive on 14 May 2006 on a rebreather. An almost new unit so presumably not a sensor or mechanical failure but who knows with the complexity of rebreathers?
Charlie