Re: Newbie Question

["Sean T. Stevenson" <ststev@uniserve.com>]

Vance, thank you for your response.  Perhaps you could clarify what
exactly are the real risks in this application?  ie. loss of vehicle
control (blowup in ambient mode), diver separation or ?...   Keep in
mind that for PSub application we are not talking about anything close
to sat, but rather short, clearly defined tasks with bottom times of
about 10 minutes or less.  For a 100 m rated vehicle, the diver could
easily carry his own gas for this deco as a precaution.  (pneumo to
diver for max. excursion depth, but on SCUBA rather than a hookah). 
Perhaps there are other, less immediately apparent risks?

-Sean


On Fri, 15 Oct 1999 10:38:47 EDT, VBra676539@aol.com wrote:

>In the early days of DLO work (late 60s) Roger Cook, George Bezak and Dennie Breese did some "live-boating" as it was called, in Ed Link's shiny new Deep Diver. That is, punching the diver out, trimming back to neutral, and navigating behind the diver as he or she worked. There was more of it done out of Shelf Diver in the Gulf of Mexico the next year, but the practice was discontinued following questions by the US Navy and the insurance folks. One mistake with a saturated diver and he dies, simple as that, and there was really no defense against that concern. In the years that followed, where we did hundreds of DLO dives per year and supported divers for thousands of work hours, it was never attempted again (to my knowledge).
>
>In the psub you envision you also run the risk of injuring the pilot as well as the diver. Most of us sub drivers felt pretty confident that we could maintain depth and noodle along behind scientists or commercial divers, but the powers that be made it an "absolutely not now not never" kind of deal, so we didn't.
>Vance
>