Originally Posted By Figurehead On Wednesday we were in line for Monsters Inc. and we were right by the window where you could watch people loading. There was a teenaged boy with some mental handicap that was throwing a fit while loading because he couldn't sit in the front. The CMs and his family tried to get him to settle down but nothing they did would get him to just sit and ride. This caused the ride to stop completely for 5 minutes plus. The ride completely shut down and they had to remove the boy from the entire ride, which took another 5 minutes, and they had to go through and walk everyone that was inside off. Then they announced they would be shut down for the next 20 minutes MINIMUM and then when it would be back up running they would have to wait another 20 minutes for it to cycle through. Isn't this a little excessive for a dark ride? I understand safety first and all, but c'mon, seriously?
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 I understand safety first and all, but c'mon, seriously?<< You can blame a number of factors, including but not limited to the moron who stood up on Splash and killed himself, the morons who attempt to leave ride vehicles when a vehicle is stopped, and numerous state regulations Disney must follow. Safety may suck, but Disney is bound by many factors when it comes to ride safety.
Originally Posted By mawnck You can very easily be seriously killed on a dark ride, or anywhere else where there's a lot of unattended heavy machinery.
Originally Posted By FerretAfros Just out of curiosity, how do you get killed in an unserious way? : )
Originally Posted By SuperDry So, which rides are like Monsters, where if the vehicles don't get dispatched quickly enough, the ride eventually shuts down and requires an evacuation and reset procedure? I seem to remember that at least the old Space Mountain was that way. Are all of the Fantasyland dark rides like this as well? And, which rides are NOT like this? HM is obviously one of them, and I'd think that POTC and Splash Mountain might be okay in this regard as well.
Originally Posted By Hista98 the new space mountian, all the FL classics and matterhorn, basiclly anything that has a station and moving cars that stop there can cascade or backup to the disney lay person.
Originally Posted By sjdimon 20 minutes does not sound that bad - of course -it's awful if you are that close to boarding and you have to wait. Since all of these attractions are very computer-based, it's essentially rebooting the attraction to a startup sequence. Timing is **critical** to these attractions, look at Toy Story Midway Mania - they even built-in a separate queue area that they can dispatch to/from for slower loading parties. I can just imagine how many shutdowns have been avoided due to this foresight. There's probably a way that you can "interrupt" the attraction (causing all vehicles to stop where they are) - but it might be harder to get everything "synced" back up properly. If they don't "catch it" in time, then I guess it can lead to a cascade shutdown that requires the entire attraction be reset (another factor that adds to the amount of time it takes to reset an attraction is that you have to cycle the vehicles through empty first, then you can reopen, and then start loading them again).
