Tony,

This is the meat in what, on 4 Oct 1996, Anthony Martinez wrote:

> Rebreathers (as they exist today) are neither sufficiently fault tolerant
> nor user friendly enough for them to be considered an added safety
> advantage. I will not accept that today's rebreathers are a safer means
> for sport divers to accomplish their goals. There are cases where
> logistically speaking, a rebreather may make a dive or a series of dives
> more feasible, but at a loss of reliability and safety.

I am certainly not the one to tell you they are or are not more or less
reliable. There are people on this list who clearly believe that they are,
or they wouldn't be diving them and there are others who believe that if
God had intended us to fly, he'd never have given us the railways.

The issue is not whether Joe Sportdiver is going to change from OC to CCR
and be safer. That's not what I believe and not what I said. But, as you
note, a rebreather may make logistic sense for some divers. You issue is
reliability. The first step is to design and build units that make sense.
The second is to to have them tested in real diving situations. Both of
this has happened in the military. Rod Farb's point is (I believe) that
the military experience is only so-so applicable to the tech diver.
Techdivers dive deeper, longer and in places where there is much less
surface support. The only question is whether modifications to the Navy's
routine to deal with these exigencies makes it better or worse. That's the
real issue of this debate. People *will* use rebreathers, just as others
*will* go on using OC. It's more reasonable to learn from both types of
experience than to assume one is inherently better than the other.

Peace

-peter heseltine

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