Enriched Air - Nitrox
The Enriched Air Nitrox course gives you the chance to increase your bottom times and reduce your surface intervals as a result of extended decompression limits.
During the course, divers are taught how to get more dive time using air enriched with nitrox.
You'll become familiar with the specialised equipment for nitrox diving including nitrox tanks and how to identify what kind of air is in your tank.
There are special considerations you'll be made aware of, such as managing your own oxygen exposure and configuring your dive computer to dive with nitrox.
WHERE will it take me?
The Enriched Air Nitrox course is an especially useful course to take when you start to do more dives, especially when trying to do multiple dives in one day.
WHY should I be excited?
Diving with Nitrox is appealing to underwater photographers, wreck enthusiasts and anyone who wants to stay underwater for longer.
HOW do I do it?
One of the best places to complete the Enriched Air course is in Mabul and Sipadan, where the more time you spend scouring the ocean floor the more interesting creatures you're likely to come across.
Ask us about the Nitrox Courses
More about PADI Enriched Air — Nitrox
Specialty dive courses. The Enriched Air Nitrox course is the most popular specialty in diving for one unglamorous, excellent reason: more bottom time. Breathing air enriched with a higher oxygen fraction reduces the nitrogen you absorb, extending your no-decompression limits and shortening surface intervals — which, on a multi-dive Mabul day, converts directly into more minutes with the frogfish.
What will I learn? How to plan and dive with enriched air safely: analysing your own tank (every fill, every time — the habit is the course), setting your computer for the mix, understanding oxygen exposure limits and maximum depths per blend. It's a short course — theory plus practical application, commonly completed alongside your normal diving in a day or so — with no compulsory open-water skill dives beyond using the gas.
Who's it for? Certified divers (Open Water and up, minimum age 12) — and honestly, anyone doing three-dive days here. The sites of Mabul and Kapalai live in exactly the depth band where nitrox pays best: 12–20 metres, where the extended limits mean the guide's "time to go up" comes from the dive plan, not your computer.
Straight talk: nitrox is not a deep-diving gas and doesn't make you safer by magic — it's a bottom-time tool used within its limits, which is precisely what the course teaches.