RR871 - Assessment of manual operations and emergency procedures for closed circuit rebreathers
Closed Circuit Re-breather (CCR) diving has become increasingly popular as more sophisticated units enable diving for longer and at greater depths. CCR diving is much more complex than traditional open circuit diving in many ways and there is an increased potential for problems and diver errors to emerge. However, formal research examining CCR safety has been rare. To address this, the UK Health and Safety Executive commissioned the Department of Systems Engineering and Human Factors at Cranfield University to conduct a scoping study into the human factors issues relevant to CCR diving apparatus. The scoping study was designed to explore five principal subject areas: accident/incident analysis, unit assembly/disassembly, normal / non-normal diving operations, training needs analysis, interface and display. This scoping study has approached this with a series of studies each addressing separate issues that are relevant to the principal subject areas. These studies can be seen as potentially stand alone, each with its own objectives, method and results. These studies comprise; Accident/Incident Analysis; Human Error Potential Analysis: Assembly and Disassembly; Human Error Potential Analysis of Diving Operations; Training Needs Analysis; Interface and Display Recommendations and Human Error Potential in Non-Normal Operations.
This report and the work it describes were funded by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy.
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