Flamingo Land Discussion Thread

[FirstDropJ]

Flamingo Land has posted a new youtube video interview. They answer a bunch of questions about the ride and you can see they pretty much have all the supports up and the lift hill installed.

 

[Airtime&Gravity]

Two fun park customers got a bigger fright than they perhaps wanted when their rollercoaster got stuck, leaving them dangling 50ft above the ground.

 

They had paid to go on the Mumbo Jumbo ride at Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire, which is described as the steepest rollercoaster in the world.

 

 

But their carriage got stranded leaving them upside down for around 20 minutes before being rescued by theme park staff.

 

Nigel Warburton, of Darlington, County Durham, who was at Flamingo Land for a day out, photographed the incident yesterday.

 

'There was quite a crowd gathered watching,' he told The Northern Echo.

 

The £4m ride opened at the park near Malton last July. It plunges people down an overhang of 112 degrees from a high point of nearly 100ft.

 

Passengers experience forces in excess of 4Gs - similar to those faced by fighter pilots.

 

Flamingo Land could not be contacted for comment but on its website the fun park's boss Gordon Gibb reveals why the ride is called 'Mumbo Jumbo'.

 

He said: 'It's meant to be a tongue-in-cheek description, poking fun at the way other theme parks exaggerate their new rides and attractions. We're not talking mumbo jumbo - our new rollercoaster is definitely the real deal!'

 

Link

Edited December 19, 2011 by larrygator

[thomas2]

Looks like Mumbo Jumbo is pulling a Sirocco there.

 

*hopes atleast some people get it*

[krouvi]

Well I got it . 20 minutes upside down is hell !!! I don't think I'd take it.

The birght side is that the restraints did hold them like that .

[robbalvey]

Oh noes! The Intamin cable strikes again!!!

 

[angryemobeaver]

I wander if this will affect Steel Hawg at all?

[Koolkid]

Apparently a poncho got stuck in the wheel assembly which is the cause of it slowing down and therefore stalling.

 

Similar reason as to why Dragons Fury stalled during the summer last year, although that was a jumper

 

 

^It won't affect Steel Hawg as it was just a freak, isolated accident.

[dannerman]

I wonder if the poncho was the property of one of the riders and got away from them and/or dangled into the wheel assembly, or if it was someone else's.

 

Also, I have to give kudos to the park staff for being able to get them out in only 20 minutes. That's a pretty quick response time for...

 

1. Someone to NOTICE that the car hasn't come back yet.

2. Realize exactly WHERE the car is stuck at.

3. Grasp the gravity of the situation (pun very much intended) and CALL for help.

4. Supervision/Management to respond and get up to speed on exactly what's going on.

5. DETERMINE that they need to somehow get up there to get the people out since they are stuck upside down.

6. Maintenance (presumably) to get the call that they need a manlift.

7. CLEAR the way of the manlift so it can get into position.

8. DRIVE the manlift to where it needs to be (those aren't exactly speed racers, you know).

9. FIGURE OUT how they are going to use that manlift to SAFELY get the riders out once the harnesses are manually unlocked.

10. CARRY OUT that plan.

 

Edit: My estimates on the above steps if it were your "typical" park here in the U.S.:

1. 2 minutes

2. 30 seconds

3. 2 minutes, 30 seconds

4. 5 minutes (2 minutes to respond, 3 minutes to understand)

5. 2 minutes

6. 5 minutes

7. 10 minutes, at least

8. 10 minutes

9. 5 minutes

10. 15 minutes.

 

Total tally: 57 minutes, or almost an hour.

[Yamez]

Agreed, I can think of several circumstances over the summer when I worked at CP where less strenuous circumstances were occurring and they took far longer. Not to say that the folks over at CP don't do a fantastic job, just that sometimes there are situations where you'd think it would be a fast and easy response time, and yet it takes a huge amount of time.

 

Props to the crew over there!

[Dr.Shadey]

Wow.

Does anyone know how steep this coaster actually is?

[sros1fan]

^^There is no way it took 2mins for them to notice as im sure the rides computer shut the ride down as soon as the car didnt pass by the next sensor. I also think the park was prepaired and trained for an emrgency situation very well. I remember when Lake Compounces Zoomerang coaster got stuck in the cobra roll and it took over 2hrs to get the passengers out.

[gisco]

I wonder what color the poncho was?

[Sasquatch]

Wow.

Does anyone know how steep this coaster actually is?

 

One hundred and twelve degrees!

[kcsteve]

I wonder what color the poncho was?

 

Good question. Different colors, textures and materials may affect the coaster differently. I propose a test...

[kcsteve]

Wow.

Does anyone know how steep this coaster actually is?

 

One hundred and twelve degrees!

 

I wonder what angle they'll stop at. 180 degrees, maybe? It's so steep, when you're going down, you're actually going up. That probably won't work in our three dimensional universe, though.

[Inukaza]

Wow.

Does anyone know how steep this coaster actually is?

 

One hundred and twelve degrees!

 

I wonder what angle they'll stop at. 180 degrees, maybe? It's so steep, when you're going down, you're actually going up. That probably won't work in our three dimensional universe, though.

 

 

that would be 270 degrees, from a horizontal point, at least.. If I remember correctly, Screaming squirrel is 180 degrees "drop". Not sure if it's considered a drop, though.

[dannerman]

^^There is no way it took 2mins for them to notice as im sure the rides computer shut the ride down as soon as the car didnt pass by the next sensor. I also think the park was prepaired and trained for an emrgency situation very well. I remember when Lake Compounces Zoomerang coaster got stuck in the cobra roll and it took over 2hrs to get the passengers out.

First off, my "time" was an estimate of what would have happened if this incident occurred at a typical park in the U.S. It was not a stopwatch of what happened in this case.

Second, have you ever actually operated a coaster? I mean *ANY* coaster (preferably more than one to see the differences between ride systems).

 

I've had the pleasure of operating a Morgan, 2 B&Ms, an Intamin, not to mention very good friends with others who have operated a Maurer Shoone (sp?), an additional B&M, Vekoma, 2 different types of Intamin, and others.

 

Safety systems/sensors vary greatly from ride to ride - even within the same manufacturer. Of the 3 B&Ms I mentioned, one didn't even have a computer screen to give ride errors to the ops (*GASP!*), and of the 2 I operated personally, one had harness sensors and one did not. Also, there are different types of sensors along the course.

 

Most coasters don't have a "we didn't see the coaster go by" sensor to trigger an alarm as you're indicating in your post. Actually, I'm not aware of any one that does. It would be tough to design such a sensor since the ride time can actually fluctuate by several seconds due to temperature, weight on the train, etc. (In fact ride photos depend upon a photo eye to sense when a train gets to a particular spot to snap the photos because they can't go on a time delay or the photos would be off.) There are 2 types of sensors - photo eyes that show the presence of a train (in theory.. basically it says whether or not there is something in the beam), and proxes. The proxes "count" the presence of metal as the axles go by. For example, Steel Force at Dorney Park has 6 cars. So the prox counts to 6, and then the prox system essentially says the train went by. In either case, the ride system will *NOT* give an error if the train valleys or otherwise gets stuck (unless it gets stuck IN a brake block). The ride system will only give an error if the next train attempts to enter the brake block before the system thinks the last train left by counting 6 axles. This is why a ride system can shut down from a foil gum wrapper. If it blows against a prox, that counts one axle. Then the train goes by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and the actual 6th axle it thinks is axle 1 of the next train, so it shuts the ride down. (Add in the fact that the prox counts actually run in duplicate with 2 separate sets of proxes, so technically it would shut it down due to a discrepency in the prox counts because it figures SOMETHING is amiss, even though it might not know exactly what).

 

In other words, if Steel Force were running only 2 trains and one of them valleyed between the 2 big hills, and they were dealing with some issue in the station that the ride ops didn't dispatch the train for 5 minutes, it could potentially be 5 minutes before an employee would even notice that the train didn't make it over the second hill. However most employees as they're dealing with the train in the station would realize that it's been longer than usual, and the next train hasn't gotten back to the waiting block behind the station yet, then start looking around the track to find where it is. Typically it would be in another brake block due to some other, unrelated, ride error. Further, if the train were truly block stopped some ride systems do NOT give a ride error at all. The block stop is designed in case one train "catches up" to the other one. I was on the Wild Mouse at Hershey (the cars do not, normally, stop in the station) once with a couple of... "large friends", and our car actually caught up to the one in front of us so much that when the car got to the end of the station, the ride system stopped the cars in the station waiting until the proper spacing was there for dispatch. There were no ride errors.

 

Another example, if the employees at Talon dispatch a train but do NOT bring the other train into the station for whatever reason (someone runs out onto the platform, loses control of a basketball that goes into the ride path, etc), the ride system will let the train go through the ride course, then stop it (pretty hard, actually) in the brakes at the very end of the ride. The system will NOT give a ride error, because nothing is, technically, "wrong". The block system prevented a collision, as it's intended to do, and will wait until the other train is brought into the station, and then release the brakes on the other train allowing it to advance. It will only give an error if there is a discrepency in the sensors (i.e. something blocking the photo eye but the prox system says there is no train there like the ride ops do during a morning test, or a mismatch in the prox counts as I illustrated earlier with the gum wrapper example)

 

So with that said, it could very well be 2 minutes, if not longer, before an employee notices the train stuck upside down, as most likely the ride system would not have given an error until the next train attempted to enter the block.

[darklingscribe]

Great post dannerman. I never knew ride systems could very greatly even when the rides comes from the same manufacturer.

[Jew]

Second, have you ever actually operated a coaster? I mean *ANY* coaster (preferably more than one to see the differences between ride systems).

 

Here's a better question: have you actually programmed a ride?

 

Safety systems/sensors vary greatly from ride to ride - even within the same manufacturer. Of the 3 B&Ms I mentioned, one didn't even have a computer screen to give ride errors to the ops (*GASP!*), and of the 2 I operated personally, one had harness sensors and one did not. Also, there are different types of sensors along the course.

 

...However, the concept of the ride track itself being split into different zones/blocks/whatever you want to call it doesn't vary at all. Harness sensors and displays are all optional items. I can assure you that even though the operators can't always see the faults, the PLC is logging EVERYTHING and maintenance has access to that.

 

Most coasters don't have a "we didn't see the coaster go by" sensor to trigger an alarm as you're indicating in your post. Actually, I'm not aware of any one that does. It would be tough to design such a sensor since the ride time can actually fluctuate by several seconds due to temperature, weight on the train, etc. (In fact ride photos depend upon a photo eye to sense when a train gets to a particular spot to snap the photos because they can't go on a time delay or the photos would be off.)

 

You're absolutely wrong about coasters not having timers.

 

It's not that hard to figure out how long it should take an empty train or a full train (they do have these things called water dummies) to cycle between blocks. It's also not that hard to figure out how weather might effect those (Who knew science could be useful?). Add those together and you're going to be able to figure out the safe operating range between blocks.

[Wes]

Is anyone else experience this?? See the images.

What that post looks like.

What happens when I try to read more than two sentences in.

Edited May 5, 2010 by Wes

[dannerman]

Funny... with the exception of the failed launch on an Intamin LIM, I've never seen a ride timeout. And I have seen valleys. I have, however, seen errors thrown when a train attempts to enter an occupied block. *shrugs*. ymmv, because ride systems *ARE* different. Despite whether you want to consider harness sensors or display screens differences, how about differences in programming: Morgan will throw an error on a block stop. B&M does not. Some rides don't even have a computer controlling blocks at all. So how exactly would Phoenix time out at Knoebel's?

 

My point was not necessarily to go into detail regarding block systems. My point was just that it is possible and feasible that ride ops, in certain situations, may not notice a missing/stuck train.

 

Edit: Just wanted to let everyone know, I'm done with this thread. If you want to continue to flame to feel better, be my guest.

 

I'm sorry I complimented a job well done on the part of the park and its employees who responded much faster than any park in the US would have done.

[Jew]

I love you Wes.

[andyuk200523]

Dannerman - great post!

 

However, with some of the more modern coasters (ie. Gerstlauer Eurofighters) They run sensors that if a train does not enter the next sensor section the entire ride goes into lockdown and shuts every brake also giving the ride op an alarm.

 

I will have to dig out the photo I have of the control booth, there is a diagram of the layout of the track which continually lights up as a train is making its way round the course.

 

Back on topic

 

I am surprised that the staff did not free the trapped item then let the coaster car run forward under its own steam?

[Sasquatch]

I have a feeling they might have, but just be safe they probably got everyone down because there is every chance the wheel axle could have been damaged...

 

Although, saying that there is a block brake straight after that section.

[Guest]

I got stuck on Jurassic Park under the sun for 30 minutes with sweaty people around me giving off bad BO ... and let me tell you hang me upside down on a cloudy day with a breeze and I wouldn't budge hahah