If the track is anything other than a completely straight line, centrifugal force applies.
Most amusement park rides are passively safe: Even if all of the safety measures fail, a person just sitting there will still be safe. The safety measures are mostly just there to prevent people from doing actively stupid things. Every so often, though, ride designers come up with something new that isn’t passively safe, but it’s OK, because look, we built in all of these safety features! And then every so often, one of those rides kills someone, because the safety features do sometimes fail, and a design that depends on safety features not failing is not a safe design.
In this case they had a traditional old fashioned 1920’s style death ray roller coaster. Modern construction, but traditional in layout. Which was a train on two rails towed up a long straight hill, crested the top, then free-rolled = coasted straight ahead downhill to pick up enough speed / momentum to then coast through the rest of the twists and turns, rises and falls.
At the top of that first 2D rise, the train crested the hill as normal. But as his car crested the hill he did not stay with the car; instead he was launched relatively upwards out of it. For whatever as yet unknown combo of reasons.
In the near term, probably not. But we hear of plane crashes all the time and I still would fly with my kid.
This stuff is horrific when it happens, but it’s super rare. Think of how many people have been in the park riding rides all day every day until now. The odds had to be crazy small. I’d guess even lower than a plane crash.
It isn’t the only incident though. Magic Mountain (which is Six Flags) recently had to close another coaster for an entirely different reason.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Six Flags Magic Mountain said Tuesday that it is retiring its famous X2 roller coaster amid lawsuits alleging serious brain injury caused by the ride.
The Southern California theme park said it is permanently shuttering the ride after nearly 20 years. Six Flags recently settled a wrongful-death lawsuit from the family of a 22-year-old man who died after riding the coaster in 2022, and three more lawsuits alleging traumatic brain injuries were filed last week
Agree. This is no big deal at the corporate level. Unless …
It turns out they’ve been systematically lying about maintenance, lying about inspections, and the whole machine was a slowly falling apart accident waiting to happen. And especially if investigators find similar issues at other parks owned by Six Flags.
This to me is a whole other kettle of fish, because it’s not a mechanical failure, it’s that the ride itself is inherently dangerous. Which means they are getting so extreme in coaster design that safety is the lesser consideration. That’s like a systemic issue.
Agree w this too. X2 was an inherent major design problem.
Although whether that means the company that made the ride is screwed or the operator six flags is screwed depends a lot on who had how much input into the requirements for that design.
I agree that it’s a totally different type of incident. I was responding to the comment about Six Flags not surviving this. It’s a lot of bad publicity in a short period of time.
I’ve been on both X2 in Cali and Goliath in GA. X2 was a unique experience and a very uncomfortable ride. What seemed like a lot of random stresses put on the rider and the vehicles.
Goliath was a really smooth large metal coaster. No loops. Just one steep dive then a lot of large hills and sweeping turns. Designed I’m sure to give you maximum “air time” or that weightlessness feeling when cresting those hills. The lap bars were pretty much the only thing keeping you from lifting right out of your seat. From the sound of it that restraint failed for whatever reason and lifting out of his seat over a hill is exactly what happened.