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

If you are an experienced ride-op and something in your gut says "no", I would say you follow it every single time. A small pause in operations is not worth your gut being correct and something horrifying happening.

Dollywood has now closed Drop Line out of caution.

My 10 year old had the following retort: "You would think they would test this ride with all sorts of dummies that have all different types of body shapes to see if any of them would fall out".

Makes sense.

Someone of this kid's size is not exactly unique.

When I was a ride operator as a teenager, we were trained on an "if in doubt policy" that was drilled into us as "if in doubt, stop and ask". I took it seriously and I always thought my coworkers did the same. The interlocks and all clear signals for restraints on the control panels were few and far between back then, so checking the restraints manually and visually and relying on gut instinct were all we had. Were ride operators elsewhere trained similarly and are they still? I don't know the answer to that. I continue to preach "if in doubt" in a different environment when it comes to safety because sometimes that gut instinct is all you have.

@RideMan what does TUV say about this? I know that ASTM is the law of the land around here, but my understanding is that the ride is from Funtime and they advertise TUV compliance on all their rides. I ask because of a little debate with my friends -- Kennywood's new management closed / modified a bunch of rides to comply with European standards (since they're own by Parques and probably have Spanish insurance) so we're dumbfounded how a drop tower made in Europe would have such poor restraints.

It's not reasonable to expect a ride operator to be an expert in human factors and engineering. If the light is green, they should be able to defer that expertise to the people who built the machine.

If the restraint didn't unlock, then someone between the seat designer and the control engineers didn't communicate effectively about the upper threshold of the restraint design.

I'm am 100 percent in agreement with that and I'm afraid I might not have made that clear above. I had very little experience with any sort of indicator when I worked at SFOT. Judge Roy Scream had PTCs with buzz bars the first year that I was there and they had a visual dot indicator on the side of the trains that was hard as hell to see (I only worked there one time that season). The Right Stuff simulator theater had locking seatbelts with indicators on the control panel and an interlock system. Other than that, it was all old school.

Jeff said:

It's not reasonable to expect a ride operator to be an expert in human factors and engineering. If the light is green, they should be able to defer that expertise to the people who built the machine.

I agree with the first sentence but maybe not the second. I guess it depends on what you think the green light means. If you believe it means, "everything is OK," then yes, defer to the expertise of the engineers and the systems. If you think it means "We can't find any problems," then that might still leave room for the operators to find their own problems. That could be a restraint that looks incompletely closed, or a passenger who is behaving poorly, or a loose object that might fall from 400'. The engineers can't anticipate all possible scenarios, and I would say there is a responsibility that belongs to the person who is on-site, looking at the ride and its passengers, to agree that everything is OK. And to take reasonable measures to assure that everything is OK (no purses, no foolhardy drunks, no restraints in strange positions). And, there is a responsibility for management to make sure that the operator is both trained to do this, and understands the responsibility and takes it seriously.

There's a reason you have to push a button in order to start the ride. And the understanding should be, don't push that button until you've checked and you're certain. And get a manager if you have any doubts.

I will pause to note that I do not want to be critical of either the ride operator(s) or management regarding this situation. I have never been a ride operator myself, and I haven't even watched the video. I'm speaking theoretically here and with a fair amount of humility.

You're splitting hairs here beyond the context of the accident. A ride operator can't possibly know the safe threshold for a restraint position. They can know that it's locked, and it's locked enough that the system says it's safe.

I'm not trying to split hairs - I think it's an important question. I acknowledge going beyond the context of the accident (as others here have as well).

Jeff said:

A ride operator can't possibly know the safe threshold for a restraint position. They can know that it's locked, and it's locked enough that the system says it's safe.

Unless I'm way off base, the controls of rides with this arrangement will not let them dispatch the ride unless that indicator light is green (assuming that's the signal). I have a hard time questioning ride operators that take the design of the system at face value.

I'm no expert, but in no universe should this have happened, nor should it be up to ride ops to detect a problem like this. The restraint should restrain the rider from coming out, period. But especially on a ride like this where the restraint is absolutely crucial to keeping the rider in the seat. As Dave mentioned, if the seats didn't tilt, this poor kid would likely still be with us. If a rider of his size was able to slip out from under the restraint at the height it was locked, what other human wouldn't have done the same? I can't believe there is any way that harness's position should have been enough to greenlight the ride cycle.

bigboy said:

Jeff said:

A ride operator can't possibly know the safe threshold for a restraint position. They can know that it's locked, and it's locked enough that the system says it's safe.

Unless I'm way off base, the controls of rides with this arrangement will not let them dispatch the ride unless that indicator light is green (assuming that's the signal). I have a hard time questioning ride operators that take the design of the system at face value.

I think you're both agreeing on the same thing here.

This is Semanticsbuzz. We (almost) all agree on big picture stuff. We just can't agree on how to say it.

You mean we can't assent to the method of articulating it.

No, he means we are unable to concur on the means of conveying it.

All I could infer from his post was "sucks"

LOUD. WORDS.

I saw an older report with a transcript of what the ride ops were saying right after within earshot of the guy recording. Both of them said they checked the restraint, both said "the light was on."

PhantomTails said:
@RideMan what does TUV say about this? I know that ASTM is the law of the land around here, but my understanding is that the ride is from Funtime and they advertise TUV compliance on all their rides.

I wish I knew for certain. TüV differs from ASTM in that ASTM sets standards, TüV does certifications. A US equivalent might be an operation like Underwriters Laboratories. TüV Süd (Bayern) is probably the best known regarding amusement rides, although at IAAPA I actually talked with a representative from TüV Nord, and they also do amusement ride inspections...and like Süd, they actually work world-wide. I don't know what standards TüV inspects to, but my guess is that it's EN 13814-18 which is in many ways harmonized with the relevant ATSM standards. That said, I remember years ago looking at an early Moser Spring Ride, and one of the Mosers telling me that the bar added in front of the seats to effectively make the seat pan deeper and the very high ball buster (as Jeff described it) designed to insure that in any allowable position the bottom of the shoulder bar would be at or below the top of the ball buster, and the rider would not be able to lower his thighs into a vertical position due to the effective seat pan extension, were there to satisfy TüV. But I don't know if that was a TüV requirement, or just something they did in anticipation of what TüV would want.

I ask because of a little debate with my friends -- Kennywood's new management closed / modified a bunch of rides to comply with European standards (since they're own by Parques and probably have Spanish insurance) so we're dumbfounded how a drop tower made in Europe would have such poor restraints.

I was actually surprised to find out that the Orlando drop tower (does that thing have a name? I'm not even sure that it is part of ICON park; the Starflyer next to it is not...) does not have the same restraints as the Dollywood tower. I have learned it is their first tower with tilting seats (maybe their last?) and the shoulder bar used on the Orlando ride suggests that they at least considered the fact that riders would be lying against the restraint once the seats tilted.

As for the high minimum closed position, this is one of the things I have been arguing against for a very long time. The reality is that you cannot have the ride make that decision if you are using an adjustable restraint AND the position of that restraint is critical to safely restraining a rider. If that is the case, then the only logical way to approach it is to set the minimum closed position to the MAXIMUM closed position permissible for the SMALLEST rider you can put in the seat per the design requirements. And of course if you do that you immediately exclude the larger riders who could ride safely and could be accommodated safely on the ride because those riders can be safely accommodated using restraint settings that would be obviously hazardous to some smaller riders. If you're gonna do it that way, then why make the restraint adjustable in the first place? I actually brought this up at an ASTM meeting and was told by a European manufacturer that I was reading it wrong. If that were really the case, I'd still be able to ride The Beast.

In the case of our 14-year-old 6'5" 350-pound rider, even with the shoulder bar as high as it was, I am not sure that it is entirely obvious that the gap between the shoulder bar and the ball buster is large enough for him to slide through (even though clearly it was). The guy filled out that seat, and my guess is that his frame was pretty dense (that is, not squishy like someone like me). In truth the human body can fit through some surprisingly small spaces, but that is not intuitively obvious, and is in fact a vitally important point for certain illusionist acts. It didn't seem to me that anyone was particularly concerned about the restraint position (including the ride itself...) and I imagine there have been a lot of big people who rode that thing successfully. I also think that if the seats didn't tilt, the incident would not have happened.

Now here's a thought, what if they make the 'ball buster' considerably taller, thus eliminating that gap for taller or larger riders and maintaining the easy accommodation the ride has now. Of course that would make it harder to get in and out...but why not solve that by getting people in and out with the seats tilted, then bring them up level once everyone is on board?

Finally, with regard to the Palace Entertainment ride removals and modifications, I have one serious question: If rides were removed due to their compliance or noncompliance with certain standards, why did Idlewild get to keep their Paratrooper while Kennywood lost theirs?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Thats a big question — the theory is that since they removed the ferris wheel (same reason - insurance) they couldn’t afford to lose a second ride at a park with such a small collection of rides to start with.

Icon Park has issued a stop operation order on all attractions operated by the Slingshot Group

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-bz-icon-park-sl...story.html