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Today is the last day of 2025, and a lot has happened in the world of Human Factors in Diving. This blog is a summary of what The Human Diver team has achieved, and what we are looking to achieve next year. Before we start with the details, I’m going to share a favourite short passage which bri...
Introduction This blog re-examines a cave diving double fatality from a Human Factors perspective. The event took place in System Sac Actun near Tulum, Mexico in December 2004, and is familiar to many cave divers. It was well documented at the time, and generated some spirited and controversial ...
This blog follows on from the blog yesterday (26 Nov 25) about the practical steps you can put in place, so that Non-Technical Skills (NTS)/Human Factors in Diving (HFiD) become core elements of your diving, be that at an individual/team level or at a dive centre/club or organisational level. Th...
We often hear that 'experience is the best teacher.' In diving, much like in aviation, it’s common to equate years under the water, or the number of logged dives, with competence. We assume a diver with hundreds of dives is automatically more capable than someone fresh out of training. But what i...
Story 1: Two cave/tech divers mislabelled each other’s stage cylinders the night before the dive. Because of distraction, back-to-back analysing and labelling, the bottle marked “EAN32 travel” actually contained EAN50, and the one marked “EAN50 deco” contained 32%. Underwater, they executed thei...
The following accounts were taken from social media posts following a fatality in poor visibility in an inland dive site. The comments have been modified slightly. As this blog is focused more on decision-making for instructors, it will focus on the bigger, but often invisible, decisions that tak...
When a diver dies or something goes badly wrong underwater, the same questions bubble to the surface: Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Could it have been prevented? Those questions are human. They stem from a need to make sense of tragedy, to restore trust, and to reassure ourselves that...
How many decisions are present on this dive? Two 'Advanced Open Water' divers with less than 20 dives each took part in a wreck dive in 16 metres in Scapa Flow from a liveaboard boat. The current was discussed during the dive brief, during which it was highlighted that it would be quite strong w...
“I Thought I Was Ready… But I Realised I Wasn’t” Ellie had passed her Open Water course with a Nitrox specialty two months earlier. This was her first dive trip overseas. She’d bought herself some new gear and wanted to try it out in a warm water environment on a ‘day boat’ holiday. She was sup...
Effective decision-making in diving—and in many other high-risk activities—relies on both intuitive (System 1) and analytical (System 2) thinking. System 1 (S1) is fast, intuitive, and relies on heuristics, while System 2 (S2) is slower, more deliberate, and energy-intensive. Because S1 is effici...
