PADI Turns 60

60 years of diving, learning and exploring

PADI is 60 this year. Back in 1966, John Cronin and Ralph Erickson set out to make scuba diving more accessible and less intimidating. Sixty years later, PADI has issued more than 30 million certifications and has more than 128,000 diving professionals around the world. That’s a lot of divers. And quite a lot of tanks.

Then came jaws

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. When Jaws hit cinemas in 1975, it gave an entire generation a very good reason to stay out of the water. Some PADI dive centres at the time reported a 75% drop in students and sales that year. The film certainly didn’t do diving any favours at the time, though it probably did a lot for shark popularity. For me, as for many divers, sharks are at the top of any dive bucket list. And for the record, scuba tanks don’t explode like they do in the movie.

60 years of learning to dive

PADI has changed quite a bit since 1966. The organisation introduced its modular training system in the 1970s, launched one of my personal favourites, the Rescue Diver course, in 1984 and went digital, introducing PADI eLearning to divers in 2007. What started as a way to make recreational scuba more accessible has grown into training for everything from beginner divers to instructors, technical divers and freedivers.

And diving education has moved well beyond the classroom. Today, we PADI professionals are deeply involved in conservation and ocean education all over the world. One of the nicest things about diving is that there’s always something to learn. A new environment, a new skill, a new species to identify and, of course, how to teach someone else to do it.

What has PADI been doing for its birthday?

PADI has been celebrating its 60th with events, dive shows, giveaways and a limited-edition collection of certification cards.
There are some nice pieces of diving history to collect, too. The 2026 certification cards feature the special 60th anniversary logo, with a black anniversary card reserved for PADI Professionals. So remember, our December IDC is your last chance to get one.

And because conservation is such a big part of our love for the ocean, PADI is also celebrating its fin-tastic anniversary with new initiatives, including the Global Shark and Ray Census — a citizen-science project helping divers collect information about shark and ray populations around the world.

Global Sharl and Ray Censys Project