The next-gen roller coaster: Get up, get down, and get off.
A soaring architectural monster dominates the low horizon of Logan, Utah: the most insanely phallic roller coaster I have ever seen. Forget the multiple curves and curlicues of a typical amusement park attraction - this beast is a single, potent-looking upthrust that punctuates the landscape like a white steel exclamation point. As I stare, a sparkly blue train whips forward along the horizontal rails, then climbs toward the sky as the track becomes absolutely vertical. Cresting the 165-foot hump, the train slows down. It makes a 180-degree turn over the top, then hurtles its passengers toward the dusty desert below.
I'm looking at the first coaster designed by maverick inventor and adrenaline junkie Stan Checketts, CEO of S&S Power, an upstart amusement-ride manufacturer. He calls his brainchild the Thrust Air 2000, a quaintly out-of-date name that hasn't slowed the ride's momentum. In August, the prototype was moved from its testing grounds in Logan to Paramount's Kings Dominion theme park in Richmond, Virginia. Paramount's marketing gurus rechristened it the Hypersonic XLC, and plan to open it to the public on March 24.
Dozens of new coasters debut every year, but Checketts' baby is one of the most anticipated new designs in a decade among members of the world's largest thrill-ride fan club, the American Coaster Enthusiasts. "The blast is so fast and powerful," says David Escalante, an ACE executive who previewed the Thrust Air last fall, "I'm surprised Stan hasn't toned it down for the general public. This is really on the cutting edge of what's ... I don't want to say 'tolerable,' but that's what I mean. S&S has shown that anything is possible."
"To say that I liked it would be a massive understatement," says Robert Coker of ThrillRide.com, a site that scoops coaster news for the nonindustry crowd. "It's miraculous, incredibly smooth, while all the more remarkable for being just unbelievably violent." And Paul Ruben, an editor at Park World magazine who has braved nearly every behemoth out there, wooden and steel alike, raves that Checketts' coaster is "probably the biggest single thrill I've ever had in my life."
The Thrust Air ride, which lasts only 45 seconds from start to finish, strips the roller-coaster experience to its most basic elements: up and down. There is only one hill - ridiculously exaggerated - yet its ascent and descent are so mind-bendingly extreme that they redefine the outer limits of what amusement rides are capable of. The train pitches riders face-first down a perfect vertical - only one other coaster, the just-opened Cliffhanger, does that. Even more impressive to connoisseurs is the compressed-air propulsion system, which gives the Thrust Air the fastest start in the business: 0 to 80 mph in 1.8 seconds - that's greater than twice the acceleration of its nearest rival.
I am ready to ride. My hair's in a ponytail, sunglasses stashed in my purse. Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" blasts from a boom box on the deck. I feel more exposed than I do on a typical coaster, because there are no sides on Thrust Air train cars: Each seat is mounted separately on a flat base. Neither am I wearing one of the "horse-collar" shoulder restraints that are now standard for high tech rides; there is nothing here but a T-shaped bar kept wedged into my lap by a hydraulic mechanism, supplemented with a rickety-looking safety belt. (A more substantial backup system will be in place at Kings Dominion.) The operator boy comes over, locks my bar into position, and tells me to be sure to keep my head back against the seat during launch. Otherwise, the coaster will put it there for me. "And that," he laughs, "will be very, very unpleasant."
In the next seat is my host, Quin Checketts - Stan's 30-year-old son. Sunburned, balding, and with an earnest manner that betrays his Mormon upbringing, he is S&S' senior project manager for coasters. He's squiring me around before I meet the brain behind the big machine - the father whose manic, risk-taking personality has already made him a legend among thrill seekers. "If no one else is doing it, he's interested in it," Quin says of his dad, as the Thrust Air cruises calmly out of the loading area into a launch bay. "He's got a tendency to try to be unique. I think it just took somebody with the ingenuity, someone brave - crazy, I guess - to do it."
And then, the world detonates. Stan is barely exaggerating when he tells me later that "even the hottest drag racers don't take off that quick." It's twice as much punch as the fastest-accelerating sports cars made by Porsche and Lamborghini, and 50 percent more than the quickest Japanese superbike, the Suzuki Hayabusa. We start out horizontal, hit that punishing 80 mph, then rush for the sun. The power of the launch makes my neck muscles clench involuntarily, and my eyes get watery from the force of the wind. My blood surges with what feels like a direct injection of 15 cups of espresso. The air is screaming, and the dudes behind me - all S&S employees - are yelling like madmen. And then, very near the top of the 15-story-high hill, we slow down with what seems like deliberate and absolute menace.
My hands are slick with sweat, and as we hit the peak I let go of my lap bar and reach my arms around the sides of my seat to hang onto its bulk. I want to grasp something, anything, while next to me Quin is actually throwing his hands up in the air. For an infinite moment I am in ecstasy, feeling stunningly, briefly wide awake, as if the rest of my life has been spent in a fog.
Then we dive, Quin's arms still waving like he's at a rock show. Weirdly, I find the descent a relief, a release. It's that familiar roller-coaster feeling of going down a hill - only more so. And because I know that after this awful, wonderful drop, it will all be over.
Back on solid earth, I am trembling uncontrollably. "We did a good job!" chuckles Quin, looking at my palsied hands. "Those are the best, where the train looks like it might not make it over!" cries Keith Robertson, the coaster's project manager. "You don't want to sneeze - you may roll back." The engineers are still toying with the calculations governing the amount of compressed air required for each launch, so every now and then the train fails to make it over the hill.
"Wanna go 'round again?" Quin asks with a grin.
I shake my head. I loved it, I hated it. It's an unbelievably effective way to manipulate your body chemistry. But once is enough, I tell him. I'm not going to the edge of purgatory twice.
The engineers laugh at me. All of them ride this thing several times a day, several times in a row. Quin hops on again.
I need a drink. An hour later, and I'm still jittery. "I'm sorry, there's hardly a pub in Logan," Quin apologizes, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Too many Mormons!"
Although he's known in the family as "the last of the Mohicans" because he's the only one of nine children who still works for his father, Quin reveals during our day together that he shares neither Stan's religious faith nor his driving ambition. He longs to travel, to visit New York City, where he once saw a production of Les Misérables he has never forgotten.
Quin leads me through an airy workroom devoted to a kiddie ride called the Frog Hopper, and I push him to tell me more about his father. What was it like growing up with a dad who is such a notorious adrenaline fiend? "When I was about 12," he answers, "we found a cliff that hung out over some water. He would stand on the top of the cliff with a 200- to 300-foot rope tied to some trees. The other end of the rope was tied to me, standing on a houseboat in the lake below. When the boat drove away, I would lift off from it in a giant swing." Another time, Quin tells me ruefully, Stan caught a rattlesnake with his bare hands and "kept it on a leash in the yard. He gave it up when it tried to eat my kitten."
About 10 years ago, Checketts turned his thrill quest into a profession, abandoning a career as a cabinetmaker to start a bungee-jumping business. "That thrilled more than 1 million bungee jumpers," Checketts tells me later, "and I said to myself, I gotta do more." When he started S&S he gambled on a ride called the Space Shot - an enormous tower encircled by seats that uses compressed air to hurl riders toward the clouds. That ride made his name in the amusement park world. Since 1994, he's sold 100 tower rides for about $2 million apiece. They've been ridden by nearly 100 million people. S&S now employs 70 people and is expanding at about 15 percent a year - and though the privately held company won't reveal figures, industry sources estimate last year's grosses to be close to $45 million.
This year's Thrust Air was born because the success of the Space Shot was never enough for Stan. "We knew that the king of the amusement park has always been the roller coaster," Quin explains, showing me numerous framed photographs of his father perched merrily on top of 300-foot Space Shots. "We were a little envious that although we had some very successful rides, we weren't in with the coasters. We considered ourselves the top in pneumatic technology and vertical rides, and so we combined them to make a new type of roller coaster."
But breaking into the $800 million coaster market is not nearly as simple as Quin makes it sound. The industry is dominated by three European companies: Vekoma, Intamin, and B&M (aka Bolliger & Mabillard). Every year, each vies to top the other two. In 2000, the Dutch company Vekoma debuted Stealth, which flies through a record eight inversions (including vertical loops, corkscrews, and a horseshoe maneuver) with riders in a revolutionary facedown "hang-gliding" position. Intamin, based in Switzerland, introduced Millennium Force, a 310-foot-high, 92-mph coaster featuring raked, stadium-style seats that allow the passengers at the rear an unobstructed view. B&M, also Swiss, is famous for floorless coasters, such as last year's Kraken, that elevate the seats high above the track like barstools, so that riders' feet dangle free. B&M's other innovations include the stand-up coaster and the inverted coaster, which hangs beneath the rails. Together, the big three sell about 50 percent of the coasters out there.
The industry is growing. According to Roger Houben, CEO of Vekoma, amusement destinations are sprouting up in Israel, Germany, Africa, and Holland. "Asia, particularly China, is really going to boom," adds Houben, "and coasters are what get people into the parks. If the parks don't have a specialty" - like Disney's cute characters or Universal's movie-themed rides - "they just have to enter the coaster race." Records show that season attendance rises at least 10 percent when a major new ride opens, so even parks that already own coasters will very likely continue to buy.
To succeed, a new coaster has to compete not only with the ever-morphing seating positions of attractions like Stealth and Millennium Force, but also with trains launched by magnetic propulsion. Traditional rides drag the train up to the top of a hill with a tow chain, then let gravity do the rest. But launch coasters give you more whoompf in fewer linear feet by hurling their cars out of the station at top speed. They became a major force in the industry in the late '90s, thanks in part to the development of powerful, rare earth magnets, made from elements like samarium and neodymium, and the emergence of transistors capable of switching the massive levels of power between the 40 or 50 motors required to launch a 9-ton train.
These days, there are two competing magnetic technologies. A linear induction motor, or LIM, takes about 5 megawatts to launch: The train passes over a series of coils that are powered in sequence. A linear synchronous motor, or LSM, takes about 2 megawatts and uses onboard magnets to interact with the coils below and propel the train. They aren't cheap. A typical magnet-powered coaster is $10 million and can cost as much as $20 million.
The $8 million Thrust Air, with its compressed-air propulsion system, is more efficient than either LIM- or LSM-powered launches. It requires 10 megawatts to blow out of the gate - enough to darken downtown Logan if pulled directly off the grid - but S&S' clever engineering means that the ride never draws more than 700 kilowatts at any one time. "You can store pneumatic energy in a supply tank by keeping the compressor constantly running, compressing air every second," Quin says. "So when you're ready to launch, it's immediately available."
When I ask Quin exactly how, he answers nervously that he can say "only a certain amount without losing my job." Nonetheless, he draws a picture on the conference room board.
Four compressors feed air to a supply tank. Up in the operator's booth are four programmable logic controllers (what the industry likes to call its dedicated-purpose computers), which get weight data from sensors on the train and track. They calculate the amount of compressed air needed for a given launch - more if the riders are heavy, less if they're light. Then the supply tank fills a shot tank with the precise amount of air needed for a single run, and when the valve at the end of the shot tank opens, the air whomps toward a piston like a tidal wave. The piston pulls a "tow dog," which is connected to the coaster train, and the riders are catapulted out of the gate before they can say their prayers.
The result is a launch that's more explosive than anything else on the market. For example, an LSM called Superman: The Escape is currently the world's fastest coaster at 100 mph. But Superman takes as long as 7 seconds to redline, so in the acceleration department, the Thrust Air easily has it beat. Checketts is delivering a bigger rush at a smaller cost, and because he holds the patent on the pneumatic thrusters, he has pretty decent odds for making his brand of launch the dominant system of the future.
I finally meet Stan Checketts. He's the weathered, bearded guy wearing wraparound sunglasses and bright white running shoes giving a pitch to two pink, crisply dressed businessmen from Cedar Fair, the amusement conglomerate that owns Knott's Berry Farm and several other parks. Their presence at S&S is telling. It used to be that clients would commission rides that were built and tested on-site, but blown deadlines became a problem when manufacturers began introducing complicated new technologies. Now, coaster companies prefer to build and test on their own turf, then invite customers in for a whirl. Kings Dominion will premiere the Thrust Air, but after that it's an open market.
With the sun dropping on the horizon, engineers mill around near the base of the Thrust Air, oohing and ahhing as it jets over the hill with the Cedar Fair guys strapped in - a kind of cocktail party without cocktails. I'm standing by the loading dock when Stan suddenly scoots over, puts his arm around me and loudly announces to all that I'm "from Weird magazine." He laughs at his own attempt at wit. "Or was that Wild ?" It's the first time we've met, and he tells me my husband is a very lucky guy. Then he invites me to a picnic dinner at his "entertainment center" - and without explaining what that is or where to find it, he's gone.
Quin says I can follow him in my car. We stop several times by the side of the road while father and son commune via cell phone about whether we will actually go to Stan's entertainment center or to a place in town. In our confusion, we wait 15 minutes at the restaurant, eat candy from a vending machine, and finally give up and drive to Stan's place, turning left at the Maverick County Store. There, we find the man himself drinking soda on the lawn with the Cedar Fair executives.
Stan lives with his second wife, Sandy ("the other S in S&S"), on a 27-acre mountainside estate that he designed himself. He's hugely proud of it - especially the numerous fake palm trees scattered across the lawn and the fact that it has parking for more than a hundred. "I've got horses, corrals, barns, guest areas, volleyball, tennis, all the fun things to do," he tells me. "We've still got a lot less money in here than a lot of wealthy people have in their home. It's practical, brick, no big expensive imported anything." But with Cedar Fair taking in the view, business is in order - so he lets Quin show me around instead of doing it himself.
I do not see the horses, or the tennis court, or even the inside of the house. I'm not invited to. But I do see the entertainment center - sort of. We can't find the light switches, so Quin and I end up touring it in semidarkness. Near the entranceway, I can make out a sunken living room next to a '50s-style diner counter decked out with vintage bicycles and rock 'n' roll 45s tacked to the walls. Deeper in, we find a gymnasium, a pool table, a chess table, a poker table, and a two-lane bowling alley. Ever the good sport, Quin shows me the collection of custom-made bowling balls Stan ordered for everyone in the family, down to the smallest grandchild. We bowl a couple of frames in our socks. Neither of us does well. Then we go back outside, sit quietly while Stan says grace, and eat steak under the night sky.
Back at S&S the next day, Stan sits in an enormous leather chair near a life-size wooden horse that decorates his office. He starts by showing me his snowmobiling trophies and photo albums: book after book of Checkettses young and old, standing cheerfully in vast landscapes of white powder. "Everybody needs an outlet," he confides, talking about his passion for dangerous sports. "A lot of people golf, but I'm a high-strung person, and it takes a hell of a lot more than a golf course to get me to forget about my business. Only two things can do that for me: One is loving my sweetheart, and the other is snowmobiling."
Odd as that sounds, it's not a bad description of the Thrust Air experience: a marriage of sexual climax and extreme motorsports. The common element is nakedness, exposure. With no sides to the cars, and no shoulder restraints, explains Stan, "you're out in the open. That's really important. Fast and high doesn't do it. You fly in an airplane, and you're doing 600 miles an hour at 30 miles high, but it doesn't bother you. Now, if you were strapped to the wing, you'd have a whole different outlook on the ride. It's the exposure that makes the adrenaline."
Last summer, most high-profile machines - Kraken, Stealth, and Millennium Force among them - had long tracks and put passengers in flashy, unconventional seating positions. "In the late 1990s, the trend was faster, higher, bigger, more thrill," says David Vatcher, chief technology officer for Vekoma. "We felt that Stealth wouldn't have as much impact with fewer than eight inversions."
Even the old-fashioned rides were based on the idea that a coaster should consist of a carefully architected narrative of hills and valleys - and the more records they could break, the better. Robin Innes, director of PR for the Cedar Point park in Sandusky, Ohio, where Millennium Force opened last year, told me that "being tallest and fastest helps. We have six or eight that were the tallest or fastest of their kind when they were introduced." Monsters (Steel Dragon, Medusa) and superheroes (Incredible Hulk, Superman) have been favorite themes for decades - Six Flags, for example, markets most of its rides by branding them with characters from Looney Tunes and DC Comics - and last season was no exception.
Stan's contention, by contrast, is that the rest of the amusement industry doesn't yet understand the real reason people ride roller coasters. The Thrust Air will not be themed. Instead, Stan is betting that the true appeal of a roller coaster is not the flashy tie-in, the seating, the height, the length, the speed, nor the massive, curving profile of the ride looming over the park. It is, simply, the adrenaline jolt. To quote the promotional poster for the Thrust Air: "There's pushing the envelope - and then there's ripping it open, crushing it into a tiny ball, and setting it on fire."
After its launch, the Thrust Air's next biggest innovation is its drop. A pure vertical descent, the ultimate permutation of the classic coaster profile, has always been a kind of Heart of Darkness for the amusement industry - the unattainable, yet deep and fundamental essence of the thing. Surprisingly, the ultimate drop has remained elusive not so much for physical reasons as for financial ones. Industry lore has it that a roller coaster needs to shuttle at least 1,000 people per hour to be profitable. But if a train is too long and a descent too sharp, the back car will want to flip up as the front one accelerates. The tighter the drop, then, the shorter the train has to be, and the fewer people who can ride it per hour. That means long lines - and many minutes lost when wallet-toting customers could be out spending money in the park.
Low capacity can be the death of an entire genre of ride: Looping coasters faded away after the 1901 Coney Island Loop the Loop failed to make money because of its short trains. They didn't resurface until Intamin's Great American Revolution in 1976, when legendary designer Anton Schwarzkopf figured out how to build a loop with relatively low g-forces (use an ellipse, not a circle) - and how to accommodate a profitable number of passengers.
Two of the top three coaster companies have aimed for the 90-degree plunge in recent years. In 1998, B&M created what was billed as "the world's first vertical drop" with Oblivion, which has a short, two-car train seating eight abreast, for a total of 32 passengers. It's a limited format, however, because the g-forces on the outside seats prohibit sharp turns or spiral inversions. Plus, the descent is really only 88 degrees.
Vekoma was actually the first to execute the true vertical: Cliffhanger opened in Taiwan in January. The ride maintains capacity and eliminates the long-train syndrome with a "rotating bridge." At the top of a typical chain-lift hill, Cliffhanger cars move onto a flat section of track and stop. The entire bridge then flips forward 90 degrees until the passengers are facing the ground. It holds them there for a second as the now-perpendicular track connects with the rails beneath it. And then it drops them.
A purist, Stan eschews such baroque innovation. Instead, he makes do with a short train - only 25 feet, compared with the typical 60 - which means the Thrust Air can take only 960 people per hour. Such a small number practically guarantees long lines, but with a wave of his hand Stan dismisses the notion that low capacity could kill his invention. He's already sold a version of the coaster in Asia that will go from 0 to 107 mph in less than 4 seconds. That one will not only have the quickest acceleration, it will also boast the highest top speed of any roller coaster on the planet. S&S is also at work on a yet-unnamed tower ride scheduled to debut this spring. People will be strapped into harnesses, parachute-style, shot up 300 feet, and then inverted for the free-fall down. "It's absolutely insane," Stan says, smiling. "I can't believe people will even want to ride it!"
As always, Stan is aiming for "higher, faster, and greater." His impulse to push amusement rides past their current limits is literally and figuratively a desire to expose people to something larger than themselves. "If you were climbing a mountain and you were only halfway up, there'd be a limit to what you could see," he says. "But once you get to the top, standing on the ridge, you can see both sides. I love that view. If you control your adrenaline, you can stay right on that edge, forever."
