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  This is not diving, but it involves decompressing and pressure, so I may as
well describe it here.
  At 7-8 pm on Sunday 19 March 1995 the British `Channel 4' TV channel had a
program about a woman in a hang glider who was carried hanging from a balloon
up to 41000 feet and hang-glidered back to earth, That is a record in (1) hang
gliding height, (2) a woman in a balloon, but what concerns decompression etc
is that, according to the program, she and the balloon pilot had to breathe
pure oxygen for 4 hours before ascending, to get the nitrogen out of their
systems, else they would have risked diver-style nitrogen bends at the
altitude even though they started at one bar pressure and no more.
  At that altitude, pressure was needed. First she tried an ex-Russian
spacesuit that they got hold of, but when tested on the ground the pressure in
it ballooned it and made it stiff and hard to move in like when an old-style
hardhat diving suit gets blown. (From what I saw before in a program about
spacesuits, I suspect that, after she put the spacesuit on, they should have
bound it round with strapping to stop it from ballooning.) It has a
3-feet-diameter 3-feet-long front tube entry, which was folded up and tied up
like an umbilicus like in the old heavy `Sladen' (nicknamed `Clammy Death')
diving drysuits that were used in Britain around the last war and after. Its
helmet was permanently attached to it.
  Then they used a fighter pilot type pressure suit, which enclosed the trunk
only and left the arms and legs and head to withstand the ambient altitude
pressure unaided. She had a hard helmet like a fighter pilot's. The oxygen
mask was clamped on airtight and pressure-fed with oxygen so she had to
breathe out against pressure, like rebreather diving with the bag on the chest
but much stronger.

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