Garet

Well this is exciting, I had planned to fly out to Japan and Osaka for Febuary 2016 for a few days and see if I could get in a park or two but I may have to push it back for this. I've only been on AIR and while I didn't like the ride too much, I liked the experience and SkyScrapper has been really high on my bucket list for a while to see what a real flyer feels like but I'd be just as happy seeing what USJ can do.

Will we see a Yokohama Cosmoworld variant of the song this trip? We are on a log flume.... we are on a log flume.... we are on a log flume and getting air-time.... we are on a log flume.

Not sure if Mega Storm had it's soft opening like planned, i've seen no discussion about it and the tag for the soft opening was removed from the posts. It also says coming soon instead of June 20th, I'm not sure if it's anything to do with the ride though. It could just be due to the ongoing MERS scares keeping people away ( I've been hearing reports that a lot of the rides have been walk-on and even T Express has no reservation system and short lines in the mornings- early afternoons) and they are saving their new attraction for a few weeks for when people are more willing to visit crowded places again. Everland also just released the new map that will be current until the end of August.... but there's nothing on it at all to do with the big 2015 flume ride that was due to open in July, again it could be due to the MERS scare that they don't want a grand opening but the site was still mostly dirt with supports going in on my last visit, I've reattached my pictures from the TR of what the site looked like mid-may.

Can you really ever make anything that safe though and still use it on a very frequent basis? I agree with what you are saying but say for example you completely full-proofed a ride. What if the ride did malfunction and the car was evacuated, but it had been made so safe and fool-proof even maintenance can't over-rule it. The computer is still finding things it doesn't like, then you could be really stuck until the manufacturers came out which could take a long time. I guess there has to be a point where you have to trust humans to know what they are doing. For some examples look at Hong Kong Disneyland and Grizzly mine cars, they dispatch with restraints unlocked without the computers kicking up a fuss which means quicker dispatches when the lines are really empty. I realize it's not exactly a ride that will eject you but I mean it's a ride that trusts the operators to know to check the lapbars of people riding. If you want another example of something that could be an issue in the rarest of situations, I've seen a gyro-drop drop the carriage with all the restraints up before. I'm assuming that was in some sort of maintenance mode but again if a lot of mistakes were made, somehow someone was sitting in a chair when it lifted up that way. You just have to trust in the training of the operators and that they will follow the instructions set out by the park and manufacturers, I don't think you can ever 100% fool-proof a ride to the point where it won't interfere with other parts of the rides life e.g. maintenance/testing This argument in a way, kind of reminds me of a Top Gear episode where they discussed self-driving cars. If you 100% fool-proof a self driving car to remove human error and leave no gaps in the system to prevent accidents from happening would you trust the car not to kill you off if something happened. If your brakes fail on a crowded street would the car drive on and take the risk of a few pedestrians dying hitting cars and killing people or would the computer deliberately crash the car to ensure only a few are injured. The point I mean by that is you can only rely on a computer so much, you will always need a point where you can tell the computer no or at least work with it but I don't think any system could become 100% full proof without posing issues somewhere.

Accidental double post

The interview from the daily mail with one of the crash victims is here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3123056/Our-agony-Smiler-Alton-Towers-victim-reveals-hell-waiting-hours-rescue-comforted-girlfriend-lost-leg-change-them.html Regardless of sensationalist headlines, it does seem like just his genuine thoughts and upsets rather than a smear campaign on Alton Towers or ride safety, though he does ask why none of the staff spotted the empty train sitting there and called it in, I did notice he took time to mention this:

Looking at the TPR Twitter, I'm kind of curious if Tobu Zoo still has it's drop tower G-Max or still has 2 ferris wheels. When I went to Tobu Zoo's nearest subway station they had the overpass set up as a timeline to the theme park rides and it was amazing seeing how many rides had rotated in and out over the years. When I went the drop tower seemed to have most of its seats chained up with fade seats and only running one side that looked cleaner so it seemed as if it would be next to go, it also almost "felt old" it made some very slight jolts on the pull to the top that I had never felt on that style of ride before and didn't seem like it had got a lot of love.

I'll probably wait a while before I ride, last time I was at the water park lines were over 2 hours for the bigger slides and 1 hour for normal tube slides. For Mega Storm, at least for soft opening, it's open 1-4pm with wristbands handed out from 9am first come first serve but I don't think i'm in good enough shape to out-run all the Koreans who will go I wonder if it's popular enough if they will make the new water-slide reservation only like T Express is, I know last summer they did a trial run on 2 of the most popular water slides where you reserved a time at opening to come back and ride them.

One of my students showed me how to get the links for the Korean version of google street view, in Korea they have both an airplane mode and a street view mode so here's the link if you've ever wanted to walk around Everland Everland: The street view is almost 5 years old and the airplane view over 6 years old, so quite a bit of the park has changed since then but it's still an interesting look around. Eagles Fortress' photos were taken not only before it was torn out but before the area had become overgrown. Walk around the park Fly-Over Lotte World: These views are even older and taken in 2009, sadly not street view. Fly-Over

Wow the Matterhorn Bobsleds one has so much going on in it: http://ridesims.com/simulations/matterhorn-bobsleds/

That did get mentioned in the TR :

So with Everland soft opening Mega Storm this Saturday, they've updated the site with Mega Storm's micro site: http://www.everland.com/web/intro.html It could be nothing but I find the slide in the bottom left interesting. It could just be an artists representation of the ordinary tube slide but the colors and type of tube are completely different. I would think nothing of it but if you look at the entrance building there's a sign that says -mpest (I'm going to assume Tempest) that isn't present on the building currently whereas everything else in the picture matches up. Could this picture have accidentally revealed something to come to the water park next year?

^ Unless it's something completely new, I think we are more likely to see a version of Singapores flyers than IoA's since Singapores has a higher capacity.

Apparently 10 minute closures counts as news now: http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Alton-Towers-shut-rollercoaster/story-26662463-detail/story.html

Kind of curious looking at the closed list of rides among the parks that X isn't on the list. Isn't that also a multi block ride? Seems kind of strange they shut down every ride with blocks except that one or did X already have the "protocols" in place?

This one was a little buried under all the MERS panic (the parks are all walk-on and completely deserted right now) but there was another incident in Lotte World 2, not sure this one is their fault or related to construction but again it's not really helping settle the public unease right now: Source

Yep like this very helpful infographic, maybe this should be shared with the sky news reporter when she keeps talking about how they've been operating unsafe rides.

It'll be interesting to see if Korea's park and water park numbers drop next year compared to the ones in this report. With MERs panic across Korea right now, parks are apparently walk-on on a saturday with their rides right now whereas normally with the start of the summer season, lines would be an hour long for a lot of the rides. Although both Caribbean Bay (Everland's water park) and Lotte Water Park are opening pretty big new flumes this month and Everland has it's major new water ride scheduled for next month which might counter-act that.

It's just a poorly designed ride vehicle. I don't think it's a poorly designed vehicle, considering the positive comments on the other zac spins... I think it's the modifications SFMM made to reduce spinning that made it uncomfortable, didn't some-one say MM added weights to the bottom of the carriages?

Alton Towers have also announced they'll be closed tomorrow as well.

All 4 people in the front row have now been named: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33011347

I've seen the POV (we have one on our channel!) that doesn't actually tell me that much when you're not that familiar with the ride. I was hoping that someone who has been on the ride could tell me how fast it feels at the point of the impact and if that is one of the faster parts of the coaster. Thank you. 20mph according to this article: http://news.sky.com/story/1496002/alton-towers-crash-survivor-is-overwhelmed

Wow, I knew Harry Potter had been popular in Japan but that's a huge boost! Considering people said the lines weren't as busy as they expected them to be for Gringotts I'm surprised to see Universal Orlando had a similar boost.

New waterslide coming to Everland's waterpark: Mega Storm [youtu_be] [/youtu_be]

Not much in this video that hasn't been seen but it does show the empty train sitting there at the end of the video (i'm assuming before the crash): http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-32981573