My family and I just got back from King’s Island in Cincinnati. We had a really fun time, especially since my seven year old son is now tall enough to ride some of the cooler coasters like The Beast, which is an awesome wooden coaster.
Anyway, my question is regarding the over-the shoulder safety restraints on some of the more topsy turvy rides and coasters.
These things lock into place and presumably cannot open. Nothing to me is more terrifying than being on a ride where your entire body weight (and hence your life) is completely at the mercy of a safety restraint while you’re being suspended upside down at a high rate of speed.
So…how does the mechanism for locking and opening these devices work? Can they possibly just open at some random interval, or break and then open during the course of a ride? What redundant safety measures are in place with these things?
It’s amazing to me that crazy fast and scary rides can be so reliable when they are used so often over and over. Thoughts?
An online friend of mine was very knowledgable on amusement parks, especially the electrical side. Unfortunately he died a little while back but he started a thread about it on a board for PLC guys. I haven’t read the thread in a while and can’t remember if it veers off into electrical nerdspeak but I think you’ll like it anyway.
I read a couple of years ago that the safety restraints are all redundant; even without them, you would not fall out unless you try to stand up or climb out, which they should prevent you from doing. I have never tested this out.
I just read that. Interesting, thanks. It doesn’t really address coasters or even really amusement park rides, but the insight on the carnival type rides was fascinating. I found it curious that the OP of that thread thought that amusement park rides were less safe than carnival rides due to (what he implied were) less stringent regs and inspections. I find that hard to believe, but what do I know.
One of the other scariest things about amusement park rides, especially the huge, fast ones, is that they are staffed by bored teenagers pushing buttons!
I think the design for both types of rides are the same but the permanent structures get inspected less frequently so that was why he felt they were less safe. He was pretty rigid in his thinking so that might just be his bias toward the traveling rides. I’ll look around some more, there are some other posters on that site who work in amusement parks. I’ve come across a lot of interesting anecdotes and links from those guys.
The restraints usually use either a ratcheting system sometimes held in place by springs or some of the newer ones use a hydraulic system for keeping the restraints in place. Many rides with over-the-shoulder restraints use seatbelts as a redundant backups but I can’t ever recall hearing of a restraint failing in my many years of hearing of roller coaster accidents. Other failures, like the chain failing on the lift hill, are more likely failures… But even then it’s no big deal.
Roller coasters are ridiculously safe… Golf, children’s wagons, and folding lawn chairs all have higher injury rates than roller coasters. And even then most of the accidents caused on coasters are due to riders ignoring safety rules. Coasters are safe because of their automation that puts everything through a computer to ensure everything is working correctly. That’s why they entrust multi-million dollar rides to teenagers (and why they put me in charge of a 14-million dollar ride when I was 17). Rides at reputable theme parks are inspected daily for 4+ hours, and yearly on a more extensive basis (like ultrasonic non-destructive testing). Parks know how big of an investment their rides are and what accidents do to their reputation.
A site with good behind-the-scenes coaster safety stuff I’ve come across is CoasterQuest.com, particularly this page and this page. Another good site with the technology of coaster safety devices is this one.
And I can vouch for the number of near-accidents we had on my ride just due to stupid guests, like the ones who decide their $15 hat is worth jumping two layers of fences to fetch it from the “kill-zone”…
I can’t find where I read this. Googling it brings up a lot of interesting articles. I could very well be wrong on it. Especially since people occasionally fall out. Maybe I read that the seat belts are the redundant restraint, after the safety bar.
[Ex amusement park operations supervisor shades on]
Brandon pretty much nailed it, but to add. Those shoulder harnesses are padding wrapped around 2" steel bar stock. You could hang 10 people from those harnesses and they would not bend/break. The ratches mechanisms are similarly beefy.
That said, I have seen a harness break off on one side at the ratchet, by the time the ride stopped, all it did was bend about an inch away from the break point with a pretty good sized guy in that seat.
The reliability you see is constant preventative maintenance and massive overbuilding. When people design amusement park rides, if 1" thick steel will do, its probably doubled if not tripled. Amusement park rides, being very powerful machines, will grind up people in a heartbeat when they fail. The last thing any ride designer wants is to hear they underestimated the loading.
Amusement park rides are pretty much designed to be idiotproof, but every once in a while along comes a really creative idiot.
Look at the pirate ship ride, second pic down. A guy actually managed to flip a leg out and smashed it across one of the support beams to the right of the operator, crushing part of the decorative lights in the process.
and those buttons are often releases that stop the fail in safer position from happening. The automated controls are usually setup so that without intervention, the ride stops safely and will not proceed. That way if something happens to the operator, you dont end up with 4 rollercoaster trains smashing into each other in the station. In many cases the controls will not release the train unless other telltales indicate the way ahead is clear.
I know the systems are quite safe and failures are unlikely, but it still makes sense to me to wonder how they work and want to know for your own peace of mind. I was once at Paramount’s Great America (formerly Marriott’s Great America) in California, and we loaded up on the one coaster they have that is seated 4 across in a severely reclined position and the car goes backwards. You end up effectively flying head first, and for a significant portion of the route, you’re hanging upside down from the track doing it, so your life pretty much depends on that restraint working properly. Anyway, there were only 3 in my party, so the seat next to me was empty. The ride operator closed and checked all four restraints, empty seat included. Just as they were about to send the car out of the station, the restraint in the empty seat simply popped open. They unloaded everyone from the train and sent it around for an empty run before letting us all back on it. That gave me pause, to say the least. I still had enough confidence in the systems to get back on and ride it, though.
It’s possible that the design of restraint systems is proprietary or a trade secret. A report from the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, a federal agency, says
Edit: There is other information in the report about specific incidents of restraint failure.
Wow, was this the incident? After hearing about that accident, I felt particularly sorry for the innocent rider who had her leg severely broken after it decapitated the kid…
I hang around CoasterFanatics and CoasterBuzz ------- that teenagers thing bothers most of the park fans to one point or another. Although its the active hormones more than boredom that comes into play. Let’s see ------- try to get a BJ later from Sandra over in games or pay attention to the riders? I would hate to make that decision myself.
The first part -------- most parks have their own people certified as ride inspectors for their rides. In other words, at Kings Island (whoever own it this week) the safety inspections required by law are often being done by employees getting their checks signed by Kings Island. This varies from state to state but that’s the general rule of thumb. Traveling shows are another story; especially interstate ones. Usually the person inspecting them draws either a State paycheck or a Kings Island paycheck. It comes down to who you trust the most to be impartial and responsible which you think is safest.
