I recently “road tested” the AV2, along with Medical Mick, and I have to tell you, it’s fantastic fun! The AV2 is not like a conventional scooter that pulls you along, you effectively “ride” it.
Once in the water, you place the Tornado upright on the sand, with the prop side down. You then “sit” on the black plastic section and grip the throttle in your hand. By gently increasing the throttle you are slowly lifted off the sea bed and start to hover. The hard bit, much like the Harrier jump jet, is the transition from hovering to forward flight. To do that you need to lean forward and allow the unit to start pushing you. Once you’ve mastered that part of it and have a bit of speed up, you can stretch out, relax and enjoy the ride, as the unit, now firmly between your legs, pushes you along.
Steering and attitude are controlled with your fins, very much like an aircraft’s ailerons. Lift a fin to roll and turn in one direction, or lift both to climb, drop both to descend. Buoyancy isn’t an issue, so the best bet is to stay slightly heavy and use your fins for attitude. When you want to stop and look at something, you spin into the vertical and simply control the throttle to maintain a hover.
The Tornado is fast! It’s hard to judge speed underwater, but at maximum I would estimate we were making around 3-4 Knots. This was enough to make it a job to keep my reg in my mouth, and a sideways look would have pulled my mask off. The fun factor is simply immense – flying through underwater valleys is just so much fun, you really do feel like you are flying an aircraft. You have to be very careful to watch your computer though, it’s too easy to make some fast ascents to fly over things, and we checked our dive profile afterwards, and it wasn’t a very healthy one!
The biggest benefit of using any kind of scooter is that there is no effort in covering large distances. We were able to explore an area off shore that would have necessitated a boat dive, or a very long surface swim to reach. The Tornado has a good safety feature in the event of a breakdown – you can use one to tow the other scooter and diver back to shore!
The Tornado is expensive at around €800, but it’s a quality product. It has a cruise range of between 70 and 110 minutes, comes complete with a fast charger and is rated to a depth of 70 Meters! It can also be converted into a conventional “pull along” scooter, though I’m not sure why you would do that!
Great fun, and worth a try if you can hire or buy one local to you.
You might also enjoy:
1/ Poseidon extreme deep regulator
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