UTD

Overview

Founded in 2009, Unified Team Diving (UTD) is both a SCUBA diving training agency and equipment manufacturer that incorporates DIR/Hogarthian principles into its training and manufacturing, and provides them with up-to-date teaching methodologies and high standards, not to mention a community for like-minded DIR/Hogarthian divers.

Doing It Right (DIR) is a holistic approach to scuba diving, encompassing essential diving elements like skills, fitness, teamwork, and the use of streamlines and minimalistic equipment configurations. With DIR, safety is improved through standardizing equipment configuration and dive-team procedures that prevent and deal with emergencies.

DIR principles were derived originally from the cave diving community, with the objective of conducting high-risk environment dives, including deep, long duration and exploration of previously unknown parts of a very large cave system.

More specifically, DIR evolved from the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) in the mid-1990s, a cave diving research project intended to map the underwater cave systems underlying the Woodville Karst Plain, a 450-square-mile (1,200 km2) area that runs from Tallahassee, Florida, U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico. Much like the Woodville Karst Plain Project, UTD focuses on the fundamentals of exactly how advanced diving for deep cave penetration should be carried out, and how equipment should be selected and configured for this type of diving.

The roots of Unified Team Diving's philosophy and principles can be found in the Hogarthian/DIR equipment configuration and its covenants. Hogarthian was a minimalist approach to a gear configuration in the early 1990s but those that adhered to it, still kept a diving ideology of "each diver" or a “thinking diver”, who should configure their own way.

UTD supports its philosophy of diving by producing signature series equipment that enables divers to implement the "mixed team" diving concept, but also creates a “thinking diver”. Additionally, UTD has goals of solidifying team diving concepts, and promoting a uniform equipment configuration, uniform methods of dive planning and execution, and uniform skill sets at all training levels.

UTD requires significantly more in-water work than the bulk of other dive training agencies in the granting of certifications.

UTD currently has a presence worldwide including Europe, US, Mexico, Russia, South America, Africa, Australia and throughout Asia Pacific, including China.