Windseeker

Carrie, count me in as a member of the I-can-do-it-for-a-couple-minutes crowd. I've been on WindSeekers six times thus far, and it isn't getting any less nerve-wracking. I find it to be great fun, but unnerving. 3-4 hours up there? I would have PTSD, lol.

It was nice to see that riders were given free "I survived Windseeker" shirts for being stuck up there 4 hours. It was the perfect opportunity to dispose of some more Cedar Fair VIP jackets, but Knott's went that extra mile.

I'm right there with ya, Justin. Though I have not ridden Windseeker, I have talked myself into riding things in the past by thinking, "What the heck, at least it will be over in 2 - 3 minutes, right?" Eek!

...or 25 seconds, as the case may be. :P

Did the stuck riders get free tickets for another day as well? I know I wouldn't be too happy to have sat on one broken down ride when I could be enjoying the rest of the park instead.

Yeah, screw the T shirts, where's the free pass love?

Beer.

ABC just reported that Cedar Fair has shut down the Windseekers in all its parks pending a review of the ride's safety system.

Stuck briefly at the top? I'd be okay. Stuck for three hours at the top? I'd be a basket case.

the very top with the wind kicking would freak me out. Somewhere below the middle and I *might* be ok. Im pretty sure Im afraid of heights despite my love of coasters (because I know Im coming down quickly in a controlled way). I hate riding the Giant Wheel especially when I am at the very top for the unload cycle.

What's strange is that I have no issue looking down. When I ride WindSeeker, if I look down at the ground, it doesn't really bother me. It's when I look up that I have an issue. As such, I don't know if it's so much a fear of heights as it is a fear of all that empty space. Having the ground as a point of reference tends to mitigate my fear.

I'm right there with you again, Justin! I have the same issue. I am petrified of being on my back looking up which is why vertical lift hills freak me out. But I have no problem looking down from any height. I think it's an equilibrium thing. Without a frame of reference, my mind tells me that I'm going to fall backwards. Weird.

I have experienced that feeling many times over the years as well, though it doesn't seem as bad now as it did when I wore a younger man's clothes.

I'm sure Kevin could enlighten us about the phenomenon.

I really don't understand this multiple failure of the ride system. I admit, I have never operated a ride, but it seems to me that a piece of machinery like that must hav esome sort of diagnostic display indiating where the sensor activation/failure had occurred, as well as a manual operation mode that could do something as simple as raise/lower the ride carriage.

Although if my thought/logic has merit, then it would seem to say that the nature of the failure was more severe than what we have been led to believe.

As much as I love rides, I would NOT have been happy being stuck up their for four hours. I wonder if "nature called" for anyone that was stuck.

I'm gonna be a "me too" here and say the same. On any high, slow-climbing ride, (drop towers, parachutes, star flyers, etc.) if I dare to look up to the top or even at the support pole I'm good as done. I HATE that feeling, it's pure panic.

SVLFever, you're not too far off in your thinking about most ride safety systems. In my experience, often times the problem isn't determining "why did the ride stop?" as opposed to "what do we need to do make the system think everything is ok?"

Proximity sensors can go bad, and this is a common cause for a shut down. On rides like Dragster, you see them all over the track and even on some of the maintenance gates. Generally, the computer will tell you which sensor is causing trouble. But on a ride like Windseeker, the system may very well tell you what sensors are faulty, but you still need to have some schlub climb up to the top of the tower to replace the sensor. I would still think there would be a way to manually lower the gondola, but maybe one of the faulty sensors prevents that from happening.

I don't want to believe that it's simple prox sensors. You'd think that if there's a faulty proximity sensor, the default response would be to slowly lower the ride, not freeze it wherever it is on the tower until the error clears.

I'm sure... or at least I hope that it's more complex than that.

I am generally happy to see a ride that appears to care where it's cables are and what state the ride is. vs another tower ride that didn't even estop when a cable snapped.

Hopefully the whole industry is a little more caution now of days on the danger of steel cables. I do however think whatever is causing the issue needs to be looked at and resolved (if a cable is coming off a guide for example).

Consider some possibilities:

What if a hoist rope jumps a sheave at the top of the tower? That puts you into a situation where you could have a broken rope, you could have a jumped sheave, or you could have a switch with bird crap on the whisker, or just a failed switch. If you simply ignore the fault and try to lower the ride, and you have a "real" mechanical failure, you could end up binding up the ropes, or worse, breaking one. So before you lower the ride, you have to have some schlub climb the tower and look at the sheave to make sure that you *can* safely lower the gondola.

What if the control system determines that the gondola is descending at an unsafe rate, or at a rate that exceeds the rate requested by the motor control? Then what do you do? That could mean that the ropes are slipping on the drive sheave, so the safe thing to do is to apply the brakes to stop the descent! But if you are in a failure situation like that, you want to be ABSOLUTELY SURE that you can still control the ride once the brake is released, or you won't get that controlled descent you were hoping for.

Now that's just two possible scenarios where the control system might have a perfectly valid reason for shutting the ride down AND might not want to unconditionally allow you to manually bring it down without fairly extensive human involvement. I don't know if either of these scenarios have happened on the ride, but it is the kind of thing where the control system would be able to detect a failure, but would not be able to correct for it.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Although I completely agree that if a mistake is going to be made, it should be made on the side of caution, but I find myself wondering now if there was a large amount of effort/energy placed in determing and identifying potential ride faults, but not as much energy spent on the thought of; "OK, we know something is wrong, so let's figure out how to get the ride to a safe location".

Why I find myself thinking about this is a potential situation that I would call somewhat realistic; what if a prox sensor sensed something, either a true or false error, and a storm was approaching? So far we have seen several errors in the ride operation that have occurred that have taken hours to get the ride to unload. If Dave's point about a slipping motor or a controlled descent issue is in fact the cause of the issues, then they have a design issue on their hands that potentially puts the ride, and riders, into a dangerous scenario. If the problem is in a poorly designed "maintenance mode" that takes hours to clear an error and lower the ride to the ground, that's some engineer thinking that his/her design was better than what it turned out to be.

Although I doubt it happens, I would really like to hear the real issue that caused these errors, and what was being done to address them.

So, in thinking about one of Dave's points, does anyone have any idea how long it takes to climb up inside the tower?

As always, thanks for the insight Dave, and Fun.

I don't know exactly what the layout is on a a Windseeker tower, but I was told by a mechanic at Sea World San Diego that in a emergency he had been clocked g0ing up the interior ladders to the top of the sky tower there in about ten minutes, with a tool belt on. Don't know for sure if he totally collapsed or not when he got to the top, tho. Seems that they make that a hiring criteria for new mechanics................