KDCOASTERFAN

Unfortunately yes. I don't want to think of how bad the wait for 305's gonna be with FOF down during haunt.

Plans for my trip just changed again,I plan to go on the 7th since I don't have enough cash to spare this weekend & one of my friends is out of comission for the rest of the season due to a leg injury.

Yes they do, but that's not why the restraints are sluggish coming up on Anaconda (or any other Arrow). If you were still working against a ratchet, they wouldn't come up at all. That's the point of a ratchet. Whatever spring mechanism lifts the restraints probably doesn't work that well on those trains, and that's why they don't come up that quickly. The restraints on the Arrow trains on Zoomerang (AA) FLEW up when you stepped on the pedal, and they also had a double-ratchet system. True but when opening anaconda's restraints you can hear the ratchets clicking....this says to me that there are ratchets that work in both directions somehow.

On Arrow trains aren't the restraints a dual ratcheting system? meaning that when they're unlocked you still have to push up pretty hard to open them because they're still working against a ratchet to open.I know that KD's Anaconda trains have this feature but that's the only Arrow looper I've ridden in quite some time.

It's possible as I've had it happen twice on SFA's mind eraser & once this season on grizzly of all rides. In the incident on grizzly,which happened on my opening weekend visit the bar unlocked on the turn out of the station before the lift,fortunately it re locked before getting anywhere near the drop & I had to fill out a lengthy incident report afterward.On ME it happened twice in different rows,first time was in 03 when the OTSR unlocked entering the sidewinder & the 2nd incident occured a few years later in row 3 when going up the lift.

The employees should know it's gonna be hot. It's a volcano. Plus they're working outside in the middle of the summer. The heat index in the sun was approaching 120 at Carowinds yesterday, I was working an all day shift, and I had just worked until midnight the night before for Coaster Stock ERT, and I still treated every guest that rode Sky Flyer like they were royalty. It's not that hard to just build a bridge and get over it when it comes to heat. I really have no sympathy for poor/boring/sluggish/slow/rude ride operators. True,I skipped a planned trip on the 24th because of the extreme heat only to find out that it got up to 106 at the park that day so I made a wise decision in holding off on that visit. Unlike SFA I havn't found any problems with KD's staff being rude or ineffecient & I usually go on saturdays,now I will agree that rebel yell's queue/entrance could use a redesign or reconfiguration though but other than that no real complaints about the park from me.

Now we've got a group on facebook in favor of adding new rides to the park.

IIRC no official cause of the man's release from the train was given,at least not in the media.The pedals only control the seat height adjustment but not the restraint locking system as that's controlled via the PLC & the enclosure surrounding the individual pedals have always been there. Even without the covers on the pedals you'd still have to get your foot back behind the seat by effectively stepping out of the train while it's in motion & depending on which side of the train he was on it would be next to impossible to do that with the lower lap bar preventing the leg from moving sideways.

No,it was a younger Asian man who was showing off on the ride & deliberately got out of his restraints....the disabled rider was a 13 year old who died that same weekend at CGA after falling out of drop zone hence the reason for the belts on all intamin drop towers now. Aside from some opening week downtime shockwave's been running,I prefer riding in car 4,row 1 for the smoothest possible ride.

Yeah,they got rid of it to make way for ultra twister's track to be stored there.There's been no confirmation that chang is going to SFGRADV yet as they could be installing other rides on GASM's footprint besides a coaster so there's always a small possibility that SFA could get it.

Iron eagle became a maintenance nightmare simply due to it's over complicated mechanical systems,even KBF had problems with their roto-shake getting stuck mid cycle & removed it & put a top spin in it's place.

There's only so much the GM/president can do on his/her own as corporate has to approve the requests for funding & new attractions. Your right KDCOASTERFAN. I think that was the problem before when we had the GM before Terry Prather came. I forgot his name, but people always said that he wasn't a good GM due to all the ride break downs. For all we know, he could have been doing his all to make sure that the rides worked good. If corporate is not funding the park to get parts, what more can he do. Not only that but I kind of liked the GM that we had before Terry Prather. He made sure that security guards sat at most of the rides through out the day so that people did not line cut. I wish they would bring that back. IIRC Janet Porter was the park's GM prior to Prather coming in & she was there since the AW days.

There's only so much the GM/president can do on his/her own as corporate has to approve the requests for funding & new attractions.

I guess having one of the spoiled parks in your backyard does that to you. If the population base isn't there for SFI to draw from & is used ad nauseum in this thread as the reason to justify the lack of investment in the park then why not sell the place & just relocate the rides? heck it would give SFMM another 6 coasters to add to their line up. When the park first began as Wild world they couldn't even afford new rides so they had to purchase used ones from wild one all they way down to the defunct enterprise & that wasn't enough to draw in the crowds,once Premier bought the park,started adding new rides on a consistent basis that image began to improve right on into the first two years as SFA.I was ther on opening day in 99 & the crowds were so big that the line for JJ stretched all the way back under wild one so that proves that the park CAN draw a crowd if new investments are made.The crowds have fallen off in recent years from 99/00 levels simply due in large part to the fact that no major thrill rides/coasters are being added.

Yea, WWF is kind of a hidden jewel. Sitting in the back of the boat, I've gotten some pretty decent air (as in my butt was completely off the seat by several inches). The log ride provides some nice floater air as well and that has no restraints (as with any log flume in that matter). Looking at other non-coaster rides that invert, the enterprise ride (Again CGA has one) nearly inverts riders and only thing keeping you in is your grip, some force, and a locking roof. No seatbelts to hold you in place. It would be nice to have only lapbars on these coasters but I don't see that happening anytime soon. If it isn't broken, why fix it? Demon (Again, another CGA example, an Arrow corkscrew) is often described as rough but depending on the rider's height, their head may never even make contact with the restraints. My head has yet to smash itself on the restraints. With some rides also providing some hangtime, a shoulder restraint may be more necessary. The only flats with OTSR's that I've found to be painful are KD's berserker & crypt....zamperla's roto-shake had some fairly comfortable restraints,that is if they weren't locked down too tightly.

So just because you put a theme park by a large city means it will be a good investment? There are more than 25 cities in the United States with more population than D.C. (Which means if what you are saying is correct, and a Foreign Company wanted to build a park in the U.S,they have plenty of better places to invested in.) So with your logic, if we build any theme park just randomly by a large city, if the park is large with tons of attractions, the park will do great? Houston is one of the top five most populated cities in the United States. Six Flags Astroworld would love to disagree with your statements. I think what gets attendance is not quantity, but quality. So maybe the reason Six Flags America doesn't get a lot of attendance is because maybe Six Flags America just sucks, and building three huge coasters won't fix the problem as well as you think it will. Or they could just keep all the money and invest it into new things for Kennywood. This isn't RCT, making those huge changes would cost millions and would take years, and during a bad economy like this, I doubt that would be a smart move. --James Not true as during the Adventure World era(92 through 98) Premier WAS turning things around,it's only AFTER the SF buyout that things started to go bad for the park following the 2001 season. People in SFA's target market saw that the park was improving by adding new attractions & theming to the exisiting property but due to the economy taking a dive,followed by 9/11 things started going south by the 02 season when SFI began focusing more of their ever shrinking cap ex budget into SFGRADV,SFMM & SFGRAM & it's been that way ever since.In that time the park has seen several flats removed(granted they were unreliable) only to be replaced by backstage areas & show stages instead of the rides needed to at least keep the guests they'd been drawing in the park. SFA had only installed ONE ride in seven years,PBR back in 03 & went through the 04,05,06,07,08 & 09 seasons without adding a thing to the ride side of the park.They only added a total of 3 waterpark slides in that time & taken out one coaster due to mehanical problems.How do they expect to draw new visitors to the park,let alone keep the visitors that had been coming in the years before the new installations stopped being made if they keep going this route?

The investment into Action Zone was meant to be a chest-thump warning shot to SFKK that they planned to keep their domination in the market. The former Six Flags regime had big plans for Kentucky Kingdom, but Paramount wanted to make sure those plans never happened. Keep in mind, too, that the Adventure Village themeing had been left to rot thru the American Financial Corp ownership, and was looked rather haggard by the time the animals moved out in '94. Interestingly enough, not too long after Paramount used significant investment to intimidate Six Flags from major new development at their Kentucky park, Six Flags used the same tactic (and just as poorly executed) to try to challenge Cedar Point with their newly-flagged and over developed park in Aurora. Did AFC have ownership of the entire chain or just KI? IIRC the owners were Taft,KECO,Paramount & now CF.

A good reason for SFI to NOT sell SFA as a park would be the prospect of a new owner coming in and actually fixing up the place thus creating more competition for SFGRADV.As it stands now they have incentive to skip over SFA in terms of new rides while adding rides to SFGRADV & marketing the park to the DC metro area....trust me I've seen plenty of SFGRADV ads in my area during the season,especially when marketing SFA season passes. They sold off DL,GL & EG because they didn't want to invest the neccessary cash into staff training & new rides that were needed to bring people into these parks, they had no SF parks nearby to compete with so selling to rival companies wasn't a problem.GL was a fine example of how SF ruined the place so badly that CF couldn't repair the damage that had been done.

When it comes to safety SFI should NOT be short changing the park just because of it's performance attendance wise,that's how accidents happen & is probably one of the reasons why two face kept malfunctioning. I checked out SFA's facebook page recently & quite a few people in the area are indeed asking for a new coaster to be installed but unfortunately SFA says in response that they don't know when the next coaster will be installed yet so it's not just SFA Regular & I who are complaining,it's alot of people.

I've had a couple of headbanger experiences on Dominator,nothing bad mind you but not what I was expecting from the ride either. Vekoma's new vest design in use on Carowind's boomerang would work wonders for many of the larger Arrow loopers out there like viper or anaconda but the biggest problem I've had is actually elbow banging when going through curves as your elbows end up hitting the seatback of the train during these elements making for an uncomfortable ride experience. Didn't vekoma already change the OTSR's on their next gen SLC trains?

OV really needs some work because other than grizzly & flying eagles there's not much to do if you don't like water rides,granted WWC is pretty good on a hot day now that I've ridden it. I think that what makes grizz such a good night ride is the tunnel as that area of the ride is in complete darkness & you can't tell when it's coming up no matter how many times you've ridden it.

FOF uses a five car train while JJ uses a six car train,other factors include friction from wind resistance...which on FOF is reduced due to the fact that it's indoors.There's nothing wrong with JJ the way it is now so that issue is a dead horse that we need to stop beating over & over. Capitalize is right about the maintenance budget being severely cut resulting in increased ride downtime,this has been a problem that's been slowly building over the past decade as corporate has no doubt shifted funding for maintenance to cover the cost of new rides which is hurting the chain in the long run.

Well you have to admit that SF played a major role in the park's demise,I mean if it were making a profit under SF then they never would've sold it to CF to begin with but that's another story. Nice shots of the FOF trains....I always thought that Premier simply retrofitted the originals rather than build completely "new" trains for the ride.Makes me wonder if KD,and perhaps SFA/SFTT still have their original LIM bowl trains on site somewhere as well.

If they were to install Chang they could use the riddler theme,but alas that's probably not going to happen. I'd like to know what this "source" is that you keep talking about? Seasonal staff(ie ride ops) don't know & aren't given information on future attractions that are in the planning stages.Unless the park removes renegade rapids then there's no way for them to complete a full loop around the park as there's not enough space between ME & RR to allow for a path to go between the two rides.

Shockwave may be worth the ride but hurler is a complete waste of time. I've been thinking of ways that they could fix hurler by reprofiling the first drop to go straight off the lift instead of turning & then connect the "new" track with the existing "death curve" that is currently at the bottom of the drop.