Wait a minute, stop the ride... I think I forgot to carry the 2...

May 8, 2008 3:53 PM

So who's the person who gets to test a new roller coaster for the first time?

I'm sure that the g-forces and physics of the ride have been worked out on paper and in computer simulations beforehand, and they've sent it through a few trial runs sans-humans. Still, I can't help but think that the first person to get on one of the newer fifty story coasters that are designed to make you wet your pants while plummeting a hundred miles per hour through a corkscrew is probably still wondering beforehand if all the numbers were worked out right. Who's the lucky person who gets to do this?

posted by SpacemanStix to sports, hobbies, & recreation (12 comments total)

My first guess would be a small team of crash-test dummies with all sorts of techno-wizardry implanted.
posted by Martin E. at 4:10 PM on May 8

Hopefully someone well-paid with a lot of life insurance.

I would imagine that dozens if not hundreds of unmanned tests are performed before any living person ever sets foot in a roller-coaster car. It's probably a party for the engineers, screaming and spraying each other with champagne.
posted by elendil71 at 4:10 PM on May 8

After seeing someone ride an industrial robotic arm, I imagine there's no lack of people willing to volunteer to be first for a real rollercoaster.
posted by jaimev at 4:29 PM on May 8

I went on a behinds the scene tour of Disney with a friend who was selling a "flaw detector" to them to test the rides.
We went with an engineer before a new ride was opening. The ride was not opened yet and we took a look at it and spent almost the whole day with the engineer. He seemed VERY jazzed about his job and was talking about how the ride made the guys sick at first (him and the other engineers) and talked about how many "G's" it was before they finally decided on the final product.
posted by beccaj at 4:30 PM on May 8

My guess? The guys who designed it, sitting in Car 1. They're the ones who are probably the most knowledgeable about what makes a good ride so they're in the best position to assess the ride and make adjustments to the track and the vehicle.
posted by junesix at 4:55 PM on May 8

"Even watching a hundred people go before you in line doesn't always take away the feeling that you are going to die."

It'd be a pretty crappy roller coaster if it did, wouldn't it?
posted by toomuchpete at 5:56 PM on May 8

They were re-testing the roller coaster at West Edmonton Mall after some deaths when we were there years, and years ago. They started with human sized weights, and apparently had some more human shaped test subjects scheduled. I don't know who the first actual person was scheduled to be, but they were going through weeks of the load tests before that was going to happen.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:59 PM on May 8

The rides are tested a crazy amount before anyone gets to ride. They do tests with dummies (so rides are speced in such a way that empty trains are a no go for normal operations). They will do tests with sensors in them like someone else suggested. They also do tests where they affix a fixed panel representing the maximum arm span of potential human riders and they pull the train through the ride to ensure that bad things don't happen.

As for the first riders, it is often the coaster designers as well as the big wigs at the park that just dropped a few million on the new ride that we are all anxiously waiting to try out.
posted by mmascolino at 6:05 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the insight everyone. Good feedback on something I've been wondering for awhile.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:27 AM on May 9

My oldest brother got to ride the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland before it was done. It was a consulting job and he provided feedback as to the overall feel of the ride. He wasn't first, but was pretty dang early.
posted by plinth at 8:49 AM on May 9

I grew up in the shadow of Utah's Lagoon amusement park, and worked there when I was a teen.

I was terribly jealous of a friend who had been a supervisor on the team that was to run a new waterslide-ish ride and got to take it for a test run early on.

The tubes that connected together to make the enclosed portion had a rough edge at one point, and somehow, he lost a nipple to it.

And that, my friends, is what qualifies as a great story for picking up girls at Lagoon. The lucky bastard.
posted by SlyBevel at 2:49 PM on May 9

(The Hydro-Luge isn't like a truck, it's a series of tubes.)
posted by SlyBevel at 2:50 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]