octo inflater for a dive master or instructor?

[PsychDiver]

Wow! I have been away for a few days and this thread got .... inflated!! I am in Houston and the 5 dive shops I frequent don't use octo/inflators for training. Too expensive for new divers to bang around. As I stated earlier, I have both because as an instructor I have some student who buy gear with an octo/inflator, some buy with regular second, and some just rent. It is not the in control diver with an OOA situation that you have to worry about. It is the paniced diver. I have to admit that I like the idea of having an AirII hanging right there for me to grab. Mine seems to breath a little hard but then I don't plan on breathing from it very long. The closeness and convienence in a stressed OOA situation makes it a nice alternative even if it breathed like a wet sock. I don't think an octo/inflator is any less or more dangerous than a regular octo. The different configurations are what I am more concerned about. The more variance you create in how things work the greater you are to have someone not understand them or be prepared for that variance in an emergency. The diver who has never trained on an octo/inflator is going to take your primary first when he doesn't see the octo he normally is use to seeing. I know that is how it is suppose to work, but he will grap 1st and signal later and I would rather give him another option before my primary. I would suspect that I would be setting myself up to have my primary taken away, without warning, if I had no regular octo. Yes I know it will happen anyway but now I am setting myself up for it to happen because without a reg octo it is the only option for the OOA diver. No problem as long as I have trained that way, so when it does happens, I can fall back on my training automatically. It is when new situation arise that were not planned for or trained for that most people have problems.