A 14-year-old boy died after falling from freefall ride at Orlando ICON Park

Bakeman31092 said:

Something that has always stuck with me from when I worked at Great Coasters: I was learning the ropes from one of my colleagues and he told me that GCI doesn’t design for negative Gs.

Interesting about GCI. Schwarzkopf was the same, I think (which is obvious if you've ridden a restraint free Jet Star or Jumbo Jet).

Talking about gaps between the seat and restraint as potential reason for the accident don't make sense, provided that the restraint was locked. Between the ball buster on the seat and the middle dip in the restraint, a person's torso would have to flatten out with their legs and then move upward and out, which is physically impossible even for a thin person.

The restraint wasn't locked, that's the only explanation that works. Whether it was never locked in the first place or failed is, to me, the real question.

Have to disagree Jeff- Seeing the still photo of how he was positioned in the seat at the start of the ride, it is abundantly clear that this restraint was not going to keep this person properly constrained under the downward forces and angled seats during the drop. The device was locked and still failed to restrain him because of how big the gap was between "ball buster" and restraint dip.

kpjb said:

I haven't seen the video, and have no desire to.

Was this boy too large for the restraint to lower, or was he too small once it was lowered?

Just trying to understand exactly what happened.

He was a football player. At 14 years old, he was built like he should be playing in the NFL. The restraint was barely down on his chest.

There is a video on Twitter of the state inspectors sitting in the seat with the restraint where it was positioned, and an average-to larger-sized adult male in the seat can basically stand up and walk off because there is that much space

Jeff said:

Talking about gaps between the seat and restraint as potential reason for the accident don't make sense, provided that the restraint was locked. Between the ball buster on the seat and the middle dip in the restraint, a person's torso would have to flatten out with their legs and then move upward and out, which is physically impossible even for a thin person.

The restraint wasn't locked, that's the only explanation that works. Whether it was never locked in the first place or failed is, to me, the real question.

I don't think the harness failed, it wasn't down far enough to do it's job. The kid was 6'5 and 340 pounds according to his father. At that size you aren't going to fit on most rides.

Obviously there was something wrong with the programming of ride to allow the ride to dispatch with the harness that high. Thus the reason having the seatbelts on this ride would have saved his life.

According to the boy's father (who was not there) and friends who were there:

"He was panicking when he was going up," Sampson says his son was on the Orlando Free Fall ride at ICON Park with two of his best friends. "When the ride took off, that’s when he was feeling uncomfortable. He was like, ‘What’s going on?’ That’s when he started freaking out, and he was explaining to his friend next to him, ‘I don’t know man. If I don’t make it down, please tell my Mom and Daddy I love them.’ For him to say something like that, he must have felt something."

OK, so seeing the photo of him in the seat, y'all are right, there's a third possibility I hadn't considered: The "go" position of the restraint is too high to conform to the human factors that would safely restrain him. The shape of the seat and restraint only work to a certain design threshold, and it looks like the minimum locking position is way above that threshold.

Havent been on a coaster since 2014 but still follow amusement industry.A couple safety ideas I noticed on some rides that probably should be implemented everywhere. Having a practice seat outside the line to see if you fit, this is good for if youre tall or big or small. To eliviate uncertainty. Second, I remember Alpengeist designating the fourth row for bigger guests, by having bigger shoulder restraints. I was kicked off Millennium force many times for being too big. Luckily the ride operators were doing their jobs. If they didn't care, they could have let me ride it, with the lap restraint a mile up.

I watched the critical moment of the video and it shows exactly what you should expect: the patron submarines out from under the restraint as the gondola hits the brakes. To me the mechanism of incident is consistent with my speculation about the Great America incident. Since that time I have maintained that shoulder bars are actually contraindicated on floorless drop rides because they are not only not able to do what they need to do on such rides (hold the patron’s center of mass back so that it is supported by the seat pan) but on some rides actually actively place the rider in a potentially hazardous position. This is why I do not ride the drop tower at Kings Island anymore. I am tall enough and the shoulder bar is restrictive enough that the only way I can get it down far enough to latch the safety belt is to slide forward and slouch down in the seat…which puts my center of mass ahead of the center of the seat pan, in what I judge to be an unsafe position.

I don’t know much about the Orlando ride, except that it was under construction when I was down there in November. Until yesterday I didn’t know about the seat tilt…and that could be quite significant. In accordance with ASTM F2291-21, ride forces are estimated (and in F2137, measured) using a patron coordinate system, where the Z axis is aligned with the seat back and the X and Y axes are aligned with the patron. On most drop rides the seat is either vertical or tipped back slightly, which means the acceleration forces are almost exclusively in the Z axis. Knowing that the ride free falls at -1 Gz, you can estimate the braking force by noting how far up the tower the brakes start. About 1/3 of the way up the tower means a braking force of 3 Gz, which seems typical for these rides at any size.
I tried resolving a +3Gz force on the gondola to a seat pitched forward 30 degrees. That gave me a force of -1.5Gx (forward) and of +2.6Gz (downward) in the patron coordinate system. In other words the pitched seat means the ride is attempting to pull the rider forward out of the seat at about 1.5Gx applied at the center of mass, at right about the waistline.

I don’t know this ride. But it sure looks at first glance like the restraint does not do what it needs to do with this seat design. I would be happier with a design that works to hold the center of mass back in the seat against the -1.5Gx braking force. Or even better, I would prefer to see the tilt removed, perhaps even tilt the seats backward a bit to direct the forces in only a +Gz and +Gx direction, making the restraint unnecessary.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

If parks can offer different levels of pay-extra, skip-the-line offerings, can’t they also force ride manufacturers to include seats and restraints to safety fit guests of most sizes.
There are way too many accidents that the person was too big, or too small, or something was just horribly engineered. The industry needs to do better. It’s 2022, and they are capable of doing this.
If the ride had a buckle just like a B&M restraint I don’t see him falling out.

I would argue nearly all modern rides are designed to safey and comfortably fit a significant majority of the population. I would also say that it would be tough to design seating to accomodate literally every possible body shape without compromising safety.

When you compare modern day ride seating with, say, a 70s Arrow looper, you can see the significant progress that has been made in ride seating. I'm not sure how much more could be done in a safe manner.

Goonch79 said:

If parks can offer different levels of pay-extra, skip-the-line offerings, can’t they also force ride manufacturers to include seats and restraints to safety fit guests of most sizes.

Apples meet oranges. One thing has nothing to do with the other and the logistics of doing both are completely unrelated unless you're trying to frame this as some sort of moral decision. And that's ridiculous.

If the ride had a buckle just like a B&M restraint I don’t see him falling out.

He likely wouldn't have been on the ride if that were the case.

That is what makes it so sad. Something that simple could have prevented this.

Since the discussion is about restraints here, I'd like to once again say that I can't see why restraints can't be way more modern. They are too simple. Why can't they have many more points of articulation to be able to accommodate just about everyone? Cost is probably a factor, but if it allows more people to ride, and it makes the ride safer, it would be worth the extra cost.

I'm imagining that instead of a simple shoulder harness that swings over the rider, have a shoulder harness that slides up and down, and swings, and expands and contracts, and even more. Like the transformers toys or something.

Restraints just aren't very creative these days. I know it sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person, but I have always seen a future different than where we are today.

As for this particular accident, my condolences to the family. Tricking yourself into thinking you are not safe is what makes them so much fun. I can't imagine what it's like to lose someone in this way.

My condolences for those who run and work at ICON park too. I suspect this is just the beginning of the hurt that they will experience.

My gut reaction? Because simpler things are easier to understand, and complicated things behave in ways you can't predict as easily.

When it comes to ride restraints and the behavior of the human within it, I suspect you'd want as few potential surprises as possible.

All of those suggested adjustment points complicate the manufacturing process and likely provide more areas where something could fail. There’s a logical reason why we’ve never seen something like that beyond cost. When something like this happens, the discussion occasionally turns to “why can’t the restraints be designed to be more accommodating?” when it probably should just be “why weren’t they used properly as designed?” And I realize that this could be a case of the operators using them as designed and the design was bad. Either way, this was some sort of failure of use, not a failure of the design not being creative enough.

Something RideMan said several years ago still resonates with me: one major thing that has changed with rides lately is that they are actively trying to eject you from the ride, making the role of the restraint utterly critical to rider safety. I believe that he said this after the Texas Giant accident and predicted it would happen again.

You could probably ride most Arrow loopers without any restraint and not go anywhere. Now we have RMCs and if you don’t fit you’re a goner as we saw in Texas. With that ride, and the ICON drop tower, the ride should not have been dispatched, but we should never get to a place in which a teenagers judgement can be the difference between life and death.

If this ride was a traditional drop tower the victim probably would have been fine as well. However, in the quest to always one up everyone else, we decided that a 400’ drop isn’t scary enough and we need tilting seats as well, and this is the consequence.

This consequence is not from tilting seats or 400 foot towers, this consequence is from a rider being dispatched with an improperly fastened restraint from the sounds of it. Similar to NTG, SROS, Perilous Plunge, the idiot enthusiast on Raven, whatever other rider ejections come to mind. All of these incidents have a common theme, the rider was of abnormal size or body proportions, or purposely defeated the systems and thus was not sufficiently restrained.

Additionally, we are at a place every single day where some teens judgement is used to dispatch these rides, often a teen who is making minimum wage, possibly sleep deprived, possibly just got high that morning, and potentially more concerned about his hot coworker than the ride patrons. It needs to be as simple as possible, if the ride system do not lock out an improperly fastened restraint and prevent dispatch then the ride will eventually dispatched with a restraint that is improperly fastened. Oftentimes those systems are over engineered enough that it isn't a huge deal, but as with every disaster just the right circumstances will line up and nothing more can be done, that rider is a goner.

But while this ride is technically not required to have one per ASTM F2291-20:6.4.3.7, it does apparently have an external indication to show that the restraint is down and locked. It does have a control system interlock so that the ride cannot dispatch unless all of the restraints are down and locked. And the ride operator(s) indicated that the ride indicated that the restraint was down and locked. For that reason I cannot in good conscience claim that the operators did anything wrong in this case. The ride is designed to make the decision as to whether or not a person can ride, and the ride decided this rider was OK.

The trouble is, he wasn't...and now we're back to design choices made on that ride. Were the seats not tilted forward, he probably would have been fine. Were the seat mold a slightly different design, he would have been fine. Had the restraint been a different style, he would have been fine. It's the particular combination of a number of design decisions that led up to this incident.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

This also brings up a question I know we used to struggle with when I worked at Disney. If all of the electronics say "yes", but your gut says "no", what is the responsibility of the ride op? And do you train ride crews to look for the "what if" situations rather than having them put all of their trust into the control system? And if so, what are the guidelines for that? You definitely have enthusiasts and park/coaster fans on ride crews, but you also have kids and adults who are there to collect a paycheck and have no interest or knowledge on rides the way any of us do, but they are also still fully trained and competent to do the job.

When I worked Dinosaur at AK, there were some Cast Members that would dispatch a vehicle no matter how hysterical and upset and scared a child (or an occasional adult) was about riding. They would give them a smile and a "you'll love it" and dispatch the vehicle. And then others would adamantly refuse to dispatch a vehicle with a guest like that, stating that someone that afraid could potentially create a safety and/or medical situation mid ride. Neither was right or wrong, and there was nothing in the OJT or written operating guidelines about what to do. Now substitute a scared child with something that "looks off" as far as a restraint, but the green indicator light is on.

I don't have the answers. These are just questions we used to talk about at work.