National Association of Underwater Instructors

The National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI Worldwide) is a non-profit association of scuba instructors. It primarily serves as a recreational dive certification and membership organization established to provide international diver standards and education programs. The agency was founded in 1960 by Albert Tillman and Neal Hess. NAUI is headquartered in the Tampa, Florida area with dive and member instructors, resorts, stores, service and training centers, located around the world. It was officially CE and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certified in May 2007 in all three diver levels and both instructor levels and re-certified for its scuba diving programs as meeting ISO and European Underwater Federation standards on November 24, 2015. The US Internal Revenue Service determined that NAUI be a tax-exempt non-profit educational organization in 1971. Agency standards, policies, and ethics are governed by the Association's Board of Directors, who are members themselves and who are each elected through a democratic election process by the overall instructor membership. After Jacques-Yves Cousteau introduced the Aqua-Lung to the market, there followed a growing interest in scuba diving by the public and a subsequent need to codify the training. In 1951, Jim Auxie Jr and Chuck Blakeslee started a magazine called The Skin Diver (later renamed Skin Diver Magazine). Two-year dive teacher Neal Earl Hess contributed to its "The Instructors Corner" column to inform readers about scuba. He soon established a column called "The National Diving Patrol" as a section to name new skin and scuba diving "instructors." Still, no official training and certifying agency existed, except for the training and resources provided by the military (Underwater Demolition Teams) and dive clubs. In 1952, Al Tillman, the director of sports for the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, said in a letter to Parks and Recreation director Paul Gruendyke, “A new sport—skin diving—is becoming popular in the area.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (7)

Recreational diving

Recreational diving or sport diving is diving for the purpose of leisure and enjoyment, usually when using scuba equipment. The term "recreational diving" may also be used in contradistinction to "technical diving", a more demanding aspect of recreational diving which requires more training and experience to develop the competence to reliably manage more complex equipment in the more hazardous conditions associated with the disciplines.

Scuba diving

Scuba diving is a mode of underwater diving whereby divers use breathing equipment that is completely independent of a surface air supply, and therefore has a limited but variable endurance. The name "scuba", an acronym for "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus", was coined by Christian J. Lambertsen in a patent submitted in 1952. Scuba divers carry their own source of breathing gas, usually compressed air, affording them greater independence and movement than surface-supplied divers, and more time underwater than free divers.