Flight of Fear tour: October 2, 2004

Ed Dangler, Kings Island Maintenance Manager

Welcome to the Flight of Fear, and thank you for getting here safely...I told you there were a few trip hazards, and we just have to be careful and work as one big team here.

A couple of things about the Outer Limits ride ...that was the old name, I can't get over that... We really hadn't designed it to have LIM motors on it at first. We had a cable-driven trolley system that was going to push the train for the catapult. But the power requirements that we expected for the speed and all we couldn't find a clutch to transfer the energy from a giant flywheel into the cable drum system. We had a company in Germany building computer models of clutches, and they burned up in an hour. They got red-hot. So we said, "Gee, we're kind of committed to this, and we really want a launched coaster," and that's when we went and got the LIMs.

We found a company in England called Force Engineering, we saw a little demonstration in a little shuttle system that goes between the United States Capitol building to the Senators' office building called the Everett Dirksen building, we saw the LIM power these things back and forth. We said, "Well what if we make the LIMs bigger and more powerful, can this work?" Certainly it can.

The theory of those motors is basically the same as a rotating motor, just kind of laid flat. So we did some experimenting, we worked with Force Engineering, and thus this is the World's First Linear Induction Launched Roller Coaster.

One of the challenges we had was this geometry, trying to fit it all in and get around the clearance envelopes and put it in the building. There were some real delays we experienced in Europe, mostly in Italy, some in Slovakia, where some of the components were made. In our industry, we have a very specific time period to do all of our construction. It can't start until this day and it has to be done here. So with those delays, we couldn't wait to build the building. We couldn't wait for all the track to get up and then build the building around it. Because of that time period, we kept building the building even though we didn't have the track. What happened is, the building was complete when we started putting the track in here.

(understanding groans from the audience)

So what we did was, we knew that was going to happen at some point, so we had the roof redesigned and supported with these three overhead cranes, and that's what that basket is attached to, and they're wonderful for the maintenance inspections of the track when we go and inspect the track because you can just go all over with the three different cranes, all on powered trolleys. So that was quite a challenge. We kept one side of the building open to have cranes come in and out. This was pretty much open for a while. It was so incredibly complex to put it together in here that I would come down with the iron workers' crew and talk to their foreman, and we would measure pipes and the space we'd have to snake it through, and think, "We've got two inches of clearance! Let's go!"

(laughter)

Every day, that was the assembly challenge on this ride. We had an incredibly talented and innovative company that helped us out to put this together, but it was a big, big challenge. Since then, after it was built, we found a need to add two platforms--way up over there if you look at the staircases--they were put up after the ride was completely up and running for two years. That was another challenge. We had to do everything in 3D computer modeling and make sure all the clearances and stuff were where we could put that in. So this is the Flight of Fear ride. It's been a good ride for us. We took the shoulder bars off...

(poses for the reaction he knows is coming)

(the assembled crowd cheers)

With the transitions from left to right being so quick in this bowl of spaghetti in here, we developed that lap bar with Premier. We know it's tight fitting, but the testing on that was probably about six months, just that simple lap bar and padding. We rented a shop up in Dayton, Ohio and they have these big hydraulic work tables for welders to put big heavy pieces on, and they can rotate the piece around. Those big round tables also stand up 90 degrees. So we actually welded beams off the side and stood it up, mounted the car on there, and they could tip the car over. We just went through...we also did this with the Son of Beast to get a lap bar system, went through days, we've had several different doctors and stuff come up there, and probably 50 people for each of the type of rides...50 for here, 50 for Son of Beast...all different body types and things...we would actually turn them upside down and do all kinds of different things. That's why it's so tight; because we had to get something that could be from the minimum height to as large as we could fit in there. So that was quite a challenge, just changing that over. It seems like, well, you just put lap bars in...well, that was about an 8 month process just getting that design and starting manufacturing. It wasn't something we could do overnight. It's the care you have to take in our industry nowadays. It's a long process, everything we do.

Y'all want to see it launch?

(as if he had to ask...)

It is a little noisy in here...Can you all see good in here? Over there is the launch tunnel, then this is the end, this Corkscrew here. If some of you want to walk along and stand by the fence, you can do that too....

Dinner Presentation - October 2, 2004

Jeff Gramke, Kings Island

(first part of presentation not caught on tape)

...John Allen has forgotten more about coasters than most people ever knew. He knew everything there was to know about coasters, from metallurgy to wood properties to viscosities of oil for wheel bearings, and everything. He was very, very intelligent. He was getting pretty close to retirement, really semi-retired at the time, and he wasn't really interested in taking on a big project like The Beast was going to be. He knew it was going to be a very time consuming thing. So we tried...we went up to Philadelphia to try and talk him into it and were not successful. So we invited him and his wife down to the park, thinking if we took him out into the woods and showed him the area where we intended to build the coaster, he would be excited about doing it and acquiesce and go ahead and do the ride. To make a long story short, he didn't want to do that, but one night at dinner, in the International Restaurant, which is now closed, but was above the front entry of the park, he wrote down a bunch of formulas on an International Restaurant menu and gave it to us and said, "You guys can design it yourself." So that was--everybody was just kind of stunned, and nobody knew what to make of that. It turned out as we started talking about it after that night, that the company was willing to take a chance on Al Collins and myself to go ahead and start doing that design process, with John Allen kind of looking over our shoulder as we did it. So it was a great opportunity for two surveyors to get into roller coaster design just that easily. We're very fortunate the company had faith in us to do that and gave us the time to do that. It's kind of hard for people to understand now, but that was back in the days without scientific calculators...we didn't have any calculators of any kind to speak of, that had any memories in them, so we had to do all the calculations for the ride by hand. It was very labor intensive and took a long time to do. We had an old (brand?) mechanical calculator, the old...looked like a big ol' cash register with all the buttons and a pull-down lever on the side. That and logarithm books is what we designed the ride from.

Being surveyors, we kind of had the opportunity as well to go out into the field and check our preliminary design against the topography of the ground. That's one of the reasons The Beast was able to be built for the amount of money that we had to spend, and be as long as it is, we used the terrain to our advantage. We were able to go out into the field and...it sounds kind of crazy now...but if there was a tree that was in the way, if we did a preliminary design and we went out and staked it out and there was a tree in the way that somebody wanted to keep, we actually came back in and redesigned the ride. So it is very unusual for a company to take that much time and allow people to spend that much time on design. As we went through the process, John Allen became less and less involved in it. We found that we needed a little bit of help on some things, like the tunnels, we realized that in order to keep the wood structure down, we would need to go underground in a number of places. So we hired a local engineer by the name of Jim Coskey (?) who did the structural design for the tunnels, and then as we also got into it we couldn't do typical batter braces at the normal locations that were typical of wood coasters at the time because of the terrain, so we hired a local engineer, Curt Summers, and they did some structural engineering for some of the weird batter bracing. We have some batter braces that actually have a compression and tension member on the same side, with a cable pulling into a solid wood structure. There's a lot of unique batter bracing on The Beast that had never been done before. Other than that, we did everything else ourselves. We did all the drawings ourselves, all the calculations, again they were very lengthy calculations. It took us about a year to design the ride. Nowadays I can design...I have a simple program we had written in the late '80s, it's a DOS program, so hopefully Microsoft won't stop supporting DOS like they threaten that they will...I can design a coaster similar to The Beast myself probably in three months. And that's from conception all the way through to plans. It's much, much simpler now to design a coaster than it was back then.

So things that are unique about The Beast that hadn't really been done at the time when it was built, John Allen gave us all these formulas, and...when...in Physics, when you study Physics and take higher mathematics, you know that certain things are constants. John, he had all these formulas, and they had fudge factors in them. So we were questioning these fudge factors and we've learned over time what to expect. Ordinarily in a velocity calculation you don't care what anything weighs, there's no mass in a velocity calculation. Well, we all know a loaded train goes farther and goes around the track better than an unloaded train. It shouldn't make any difference...it's simply a gravity machine, it shouldn't make any difference. But he knew from his observations over time what that fudge factor needed to be.

We made a few mistakes on The Beast, because of some of the things that John Allen told us to do, like banking, the maximum banking on the curves and everything. He told us to use a certain percentage of the tangent for the bank angle, and it wound up with The Beast being as fast as it was, and he had never done anything that fast, we didn't have quite enough banking. So we had to go back and make some changes in the banking in a number of places. Some other things that we did, we originally planned to run four trains on The Beast. That was the original design, and we had enough block space and enough brake run to actually have four trains. But when we started...we didn't have the right terrain to be able to get the second block far enough away from the first lift. So that block wound up being too short and we wound up having too many set-ups, so actually we were able to get better capacity with three trains. So that was one other mistake that we made, but we did that because the train didn't allow us to put that block in. But other than that, for the first time, with two surveyors designing a coaster, I think it's held up pretty well over the years, and at least to my knowledge it hasn't been topped yet.

Anybody have any questions?

Surely somebody has a question they want answered about The Beast!

(garbled)

Yes, the only thing we surveyed with was a 200-foot tape and we didn't even have theodolytes back then, so we were using old K&E survey transits and that's what we laid the ride out by. So we actually had to drive stakes all around the ride as we went. It was very tough terrain and we couldn't see because of the trees, we couldn't see and triangulate very often, so it was very labor intensive. We were doing so much design work and doing so much of the plans ourselves that we actually had to hire some surveyors to come and help us out with some of the preliminary work. There was a gentleman in Northern Kentucky who came up and did some of the actual survey work for us. For the most part we did it all. It was very difficult and we went through a lot of 2x2 oak stakes. A lot of times because the hills are so steep, we were only measuring like seven or eight feet at a time. That was the only way we could do it back then. Now it is a lot easier. In some ways, 25 years seems like just yesterday, but when I think about it in those terms it seems like forever ago. Almost stone age, the way we had to do things. But it turned out very good. We...because of that 7,400 feet (plus or minus) long and being able to go around that whole course doing the survey work and coming back around to the starting point in the right location is just pretty good survey work. Between what we did and what the outside surveyor did, we got it really good.

Unfortunately, I can't ride. I used to ride coasters all the time, but I had a severe construction accident, so I can't ride rides anymore. It's hard for me to compare The Beast with some of the more contemporary rides, Son of Beast, for instance, I wish I could have ridden that, but I'm not able to do that anymore. I'm one of the ones that the sign is there for at the entry, of you had any back surgery you shouldn't ride this ride. Just looking at me, you'd never know that, and the ride operators don't know that either, but I'm the guy who's not supposed to be getting on.

What's everyone else's opinion about Son of Beast versus The Beast?

(the crowd generally prefers The Beast)

The Beast? Good. Thank you!

(laughter)

(something about parts of The Beast that are original vs. changed around) Most of everything is original. We made some changes, we made a lot of changes in the track. The structure...The question was, "What parts are original and what has been changed on The Beast?". The motors and everything are all original, all the braking systems were changed out, we used to have the old (?) slide brakes, and now with the more modern safety systems we've gone to all squeeze brakes, air over spring, so that's all been changed. The vehicles are pretty much the same as when they were originally...except for the fact that when we first started out they were four-seat coaches, eight passenger coaches, and we cut them down and made them three. Again, that was because with the fixed axle system, as The Beast is, and all those PTC-type trains, we don't have a lot of flex in the car. So what happens is, you're only allowed to bank, to transition the bank so much per foot, so it will actually do that. What actually happens is that the actual frame actually torsions, and actuallly bends a little bit. So by having that long of a wheelbase it was so stiff that we weren't able to get good transitions. We repair track, I'd say we probably replace the top two layers of track in a cycle maybe every five years all of it will be replaced. Occasionally we get down into the lower laminates, but not very often. The structure, everything is still original. It was all treated Southern pine, 6x6 bent posts, vertical posts, all 2x6 mostly for the boards and everything.

(Could you talk about how you communicated with the carpenters, and whether you had to climb up and check....)

Oh, yeah. The question was those drawings we made for the carpenters. When we first got into the thing, we built the Racer here, a John Allen coaster, we had books, we called it the Datum Book, and it was a book that showed every bent, every single support structure, either plus or minus to a zero datum mark. Well, with The Beast, the zero datum line was insignificant. We have over 200' of terrain elevation changes on that ride, so you couldn't really set a zero point, because it would be off the ride in most cases. So we were trying to figure out a way to make it simpler for the carpenters to be able to build these individual bent structures, so I came up with the idea of making a simple stick frame. We went out and shot the elevations of each one of the piers, calculated what the distance was up to the first six foot ribbon, which those are always level and always stay in the same plane, a distance up to the batter brace if there was one, a distance up to the bottom of the ledger so they would know where to put the support for the track, and then another dimension up to the top of the handrail and an angle to cut the top of the bent to get the handrail right. We just made little simple stick drawings that were very simple for the carpenters to use. We also did...the old datum books that John used to do only had everything rounded off to the nearest inch. His theory was that the ride is going to find its own level, it's going to beat itself down and the track layments will kind of work their way out. But we couldn't understand why we were going to all this trouble doing all these calculations, you could calculate down to infinity, essentially, on a dimension, and we were converting everything from tenths of a foot which is engineering what we use, to feet and inches anyway. So we just went ahead and did everything to the nearest eighth of an inch. That made it a much smoother ride right from the start, we didn't have to do much shimming or anything. The question about having to climb up...I'm not...I don't really like heights a whole lot. I don't mind if it's solid, but I'm not real big on climbing ladders and things that are pretty shaky. One time we had Charlie Dinn, who was the construction supervisor on the job, call in and said they had a trouble with one of the ledgers at the top of the second lift, which is one of the highest bents on the ride. He said the ledger was wrong and they couldn't make it work out. They were starting to try to get the track laminates put on. So I went out and I'm looking up 110 feet in the air, and I'm thinking this looks pretty good from here, I can't see a whole lot wrong with that. He said, no, you've gotta go up there and look at it, when you sight across, it's wrong. So I climbed up this thing that wasn't even attached, and it's very shaky, and I get all the way to the top and I look across and it's perfect. It's perfect. And he just started laughing, he said, "I didn't think you'd come up here!" So I told him, "I'll never do it again. Don't even ask. Take a picture, I'll wait for the developing."

Anybody have any other questions?

(question too quiet to hear)

Really (??) slow it down. What happens, with the old style brakes, it's essentially just steel-to-steel friction, so you're actually lifting the train up off its wheels to make it stop, and you don't know exactly where it's going to stop because depending on the mass, how heavy the people are in the train it will slide farther. If it rained it would make the friction a lot less and it would slide even farther than that. So to be absolutely sure that we knew we could control the train and make it stop exactly where we wanted it to, we had to do it with a squeeze brake. There are other kinds of brake systems being used, there's magnet braking and other things that a lot of coasters are using now, but you can't really stop anything with magnets, you can retard the speed, but you can't stop it. It made it a lot better for us to be able to bring the train in...if you notice now on The Beast, you used to stop way out on the brakes there at the end after you go through the helix, now you come in a lot closer to the station before you actually check and slow down. We were able to bring everything in and that speeds up the turnaround of the ride so we get a lot better dispatch time and a little bit more capacity. The industry standards now are so much different than back in those days. Even The Beast...we didn't have a very elaborate safety system on that ride when it was originally built. Again it was one of the first automated systems that was put on a coaster. When the Racer was built, the only safety system was a bell that rang at the operator's station when the train went through the back turn to let them know to get the other one out of the station because here it comes. It was literally that simple. All of you that are old enough, there was a big lever that they just lifted up to raise the brakes. There wasn't even a button to push then. So it was very simplistic. Safety systems now are so elaborate and so foolproof that it's much safer...you're safer riding on any amusement ride right now than walking down the street. Accidents are so few and far between, incidents per million is just unbelievably low. Which is great. That's why we like to make exciting rides. Now whether or not we want to go 150 miles per hour on a ride, ehhh, we'll see. Maybe some day.

Yes...

(question inaudible)

No, the cover over the helix was originally designed, the tunnels, the underground tunnels that we have are original. We didn't...on the second and third tunnel, where there's a space between them that when you came out of the ground and going between them and on to the next tunnel, and because the tunnels were so short, because of the transitions to get the banking angles in there, we decided to close that in. So that part of the closed tunnels is later. We made some changes in coming out of the helix, because of the angle, because you're dropping 141 feet into the helix, we had to superelevate the track so much before you got there because again that limit on the transition angle that you can do for banking. You were banked way more than you wanted to be when you hit that curve. In engineering terms, whenever you have a change in direction there is an instantaneous change in the load. So as you're leaning over to the left as you go into the helix, as soon as you hit that curve it immediately threw you out to the right, there's a pretty good G-force change there. So we made a little bit of a change in the curves. Back when we did The Beast, we did everything with circles, everything was just a true radius, all the curves were radial, dips into verticals were all radial curves, the only thing we did on the crests, we did use parabolas for that, that made for a lot more calculating we had to do. But nowadays we're using spirals, we're using much more compound radiuses, as you hit those changes in direction, you start out with the equivalent of maybe a 5,000 foot radius and then you get down to the normal 200-foot or so and come out more gradually. The new rides are so much better, so much easier on the transitions. So we did make some changes like that over the years on The Beast just to try and accommodate everything. Again, with a fixed structure there's not much you can do with it.

Anybody else, any questions? Yes...

(question inaudible)

Oh, I have all kinds of plans and designs. Actually, I designed one in 1990, right before Paramount bought the company, and we were gonna do another wooden roller coaster. But when the company was sold there was a big push to get as much Paramount product into the park as quickly as possible, so we decided to switch gears and get the Top Gun ride. Now, I don't know. Pretty much the way things are now with product liability, it's probably better to have someone else do it, and kind of spread the risk a little bit.

What was that? No, we didn't design Son of Beast. Son of Beast was a proprietary idea that came to us from an outfit in Atlanta, and they came with the idea of building a looping wooden coaster. So they had actually copyrighted the looping wood roller coaster. In modern times that obviously had not been done. There were old coasters years and years ago in the 1800s and 1900s that actually did have loops in them. There were actually coasters...there was a coaster in New York that actually jumped over a midway, where the vehicle actually left the track completely, jumped over people walking underneath and landed on the other side. So there were some pretty radical coasters out there in olden times, but they really weren't coasters the way we consider them now where they're actually locked to the track, it was more of a toboggan-type ride, where you were riding inside of a trough of some kind. So we don't do that now, we don't like to hurt people. Back then everybody said, "Oh, well, it's a risk, I'll take it." But not anymore. Any other questions? Yes, all the way in the back...

Were you the gentleman riding with Tom Rebbie when they hit the cement bag?

Hit the cement bag?

He was talking about hitting a bag of cement that had been left on the track...

No, I do not remember that one at all. I do remember riding it before we had all the batter braces done, however. Doctor Brown was in the station looking at the chart we had done on a chart plotter. It was weird, it was a mechanical G-force plotter, and it didn't have a long enough tape to go the entire length of the ride. It was so long on the lift, it was over a 4-1/2 minute cycle and the chart plotter didn't go that far. So while they were in there spreading this huge chart out on the station floor, a bunch of us got in the train and went for a ride. Not really a wise thing to do. I can honestly say that was the most wild ride that The Beast ever had. And the last before we did the rest of the batter bracing! We don't do that now! We always try to run a ride at least a hundred cycles and do all kinds of G-force testing. It isn't as much a surprise nowadays, though. I mean, you can calculate exactly what the G-forces are at any millimeter of the track, where before we couldn't really...you could do it, but it would be a lot more difficult because of all the calculation you have to do. Any time you make a change in the calculation on a roller coaster, any little thing that you change it affects everything from that point of the coaster on to the end. As you make changes there is just a huge amount of calculating to do. Now with the computer it's simple to do. Anybody have any other questions?

(question inaudible)

The question was how long it takes to inspect the ride. All of the wood roller coasters are physically walked, every inch of track every day. Our wood carpentry crew are actually roller coaster specialists, they don't do anything else for the company other than that. We have separate carpenters who do all the other work. Those guys are highly trained, very specialized. They're used to hitting the steel track and they can tell if there is a screw loose or a bolt loose just by the sound. They start at 4:00 in the morning, so they're out there in the dark walking the coaster. It varies, there's about...I'd say there's about ten of them that are doing all the coasters every day. So it takes them probably four to five hours to make all the walks. Son of Beast obviously is the hardest to walk, although Son of Beast does have some better walk systems on it than some of the other rides, but it's because of its height, and in the morning it's pretty dewey and that's the most dangerous time to walk the ride. Steel coasters, on the other hand, they only check those once a week, they actually physically walk those tracks once a week as well, they do ground observations the rest of the time, but even those are walked pretty often.

(question inaudible)

The wooden structure they look at as they go. There really isn't a whole lot that can happen to a wood structure. Wood is a very forgiving material, it can bend and bend and bend and bend cycle after cycle and it doesn't affect it. Unlike steel, steel fatigues and doesn't like to have all those cycles. Cyclic motion is very difficult for steel to take, but wood can take it virtually forever. That's why they make bows and arrows out of wood, not steel.

(question inaudible)

Son of Beast is made with a different system. It has all bolted connections, where The Beast has combinations of bolts and nails. Just a different engineering system to do it. I think The Beast has held up a little bit better, Son of Beast is a bit more labor intensive to make sure that everything stays tight. But they're both such forgiving structures that there's really not a whole lot of problem with them. Occasionally we get to replace a board or two where the ends of them start to get a little split. With Southern Yellow Pine we get a lot of what we call 'checking' where the grain actually cracks along its length. It doesn't weaken the timber at all but sometimes they get a little unsightly. For the most part all of the structure on The Beast is original with the exception of some of the track. Any other questions?

(question inaudible)

Well, any time we have a major section that we want to change out, we'll look again at the dynamics of it and see if there is anything that we want to change. Several years after the ride was built, what we call "Sycamore Hollow", after you go through the first tunnel, you go up around and it goes through the dip before you get the long brake zone, we reprofiled that part of the track because we had a little bit of a negative G on the crest. We don't like to have negative G's. I know you all like to have airtime, but WE DON'T. We like to keep...when I'm designing I like to keep about a .2-.3 calculated positive G. You feel like you're weightless, 'cause you're pretty light, but you aren't actually coming off your seat. You feel like you are, but you're not. Whatever goes up must come down, so we try to keep negative G's to a minimum, especially on a wood ride where you're getting slammed around pretty good anyway. So we did the first curve and through the tunnel was the track that had the most problem for us by not having enough bank. John Allen just didn't give us high enough banking. You can calculate a ride that will be zero G's. We can do a ride that you can go around and...Werner Stengel who designed a lot of coasters world-wide now, he is the premier designer of the day now. He can design a ride that has zero side Gs' completely. You could go to sleep on the ride. It wouldn't be much fun, so....coaster design is about 50% engineering and science, and 50% art. Blending the two together is a kind of a rare thing. That's why it's so unique that The Beast turned out so good with a first-time effort like that. We were...you might say we were lucky, but I like to think we were good. That's the key, try to make it exciting.

Any other questions? No more? Well enjoy the rest of your day! Thank you!