Everybody agrees that planning your gas reserves is an essential part of dive safety. At the same time, hardly anybody teaches it. That’s because it involves numbers and a bit of logical thinking – two things that recreational training agencies avoid like the plague. Instead, they’d rather talk about how snorkels come in different colors.
Now, some responsible instructors, including quite a few a know personally, go above and beyond and teach proper gas planning anyway, maybe in an AOW course or a Deep Diving specialty. However, if you want to take a class that actually requires systematic gas planning as part of its curriculum, you basically have to learn tec diving.
While I’m the last person to dissuade anyone from taking a tec diving class, I still don’t think that recreational divers deserve to be left in the dark like this. And if you want to know how I teach gas planning at the recreational level, then you can read my article in Alert Diver.