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The "Albatros Paolo Pinto Project " Association was formed to commemorate Paolo Pinto, a Bari-born attorney and extraordinary champion of scuba diving.

The Association's principal goals are social, moral, sporting, and recreational, and seek to improve the life of blind and sight-impaired persons and to integrate them in society.

Therefore, our meeting with scuba instructor Manrico Volpi and our shared interests in this field let us conceive, develop, and organize our project for a new method to teach scuba diving to the blind.

This method has now been successfully applied for a significant length of time, with standards, support materials, printed manuals, and many courses already taught in Bari, Gallipoli, Pulsano, and Venice to the satisfaction of all involved. Special dives (for example, under ice, etc.) fully demonstrated its effectiveness.

The radical new aspect of this method compared to all of the others, which have not changed since the early, pioneering days of the sport (as attested to by the blind persons themselves), consists essentially of a revolutionary strategy that - thanks to suitable teacher training - constantly satisfies the principle of the blind person's "aware independence" and, simultaneously, of authentic "environmental knowledge."

In practice, the goal is to transform the blind person from someone to be passively transported under water to someone fully independent during the dive, with the companion's role limited to that played by a guide dog in everyday life. In essence, the blind person is no longer disabled, but instead a scuba diver in all respects, able to do scuba tourism and dive in waters all over the world.

This approach and philosophy can be applied to problems of disability at the international level. Such problems recognize no borders and are similar in every country, as are the opportunities they offer. The teaching method is extraordinarily effective and powerful from the point of view of educational psychology, including for purposes of updating any scuba instructor, even in his/her everyday work with normally intelligent divers.

All of this has now received the prestigious Cmas award, achieved by Albatros as the ideal seal of quality and innovation.

With the motto "A blind scuba diver is not a disabled person, but simply a scuba diver," the Albatros Paolo Pinto Project continues its work with Scuba Blind International - CMAS.