In the shadows of falling darkness, wings of the night creature await their silent signal from the moon. Darting madly through a starless sky, the frenzied flight of the bat takes you by surprise and leaves you... Breathless, hanging in midair, captured alive by the Bat. Fly the Bat at King's Island. It's a non-stop fright.
Warning, some viewers may be too lame to enjoy the following information. That was a TV commercial for the Bat, an innovative new state-of-the-art roller coaster that first opened at King's Island on April 26th of 1981. The attraction was the world's first permanent installation of a suspended roller coaster. where riders sat in seats that rode beneath the coaster track above.
The lower portions of the trains were free swinging and would swing side to side during the tight turns of the attraction. While the Bat was extremely innovative and would attract many visitors to Kings Island, the ride was unfortunately one of the worst designed roller coasters ever built and would go down in history as a complete failure. The ride would operate sporadically and sometimes not even at all. Kings Island only kept the attraction around from 1981 to 1983 before shutting it down forever.
In this video, we will be taking a deep look into the Bat to see just what about their ride made it such a failure. But before we get started, if you guys wouldn't mind hitting the like button, that would be greatly appreciated, as that will help the channel greatly against the YouTube algorithm. Also, be sure to check out the El Toro Ryan merchandise store over on Amazon if you'd like to support what we do here.
We are now shipping to both the UK and Germany as well as the United States. Check out the link below in the description if you are interested. Now just to clarify, this video is not about the suspended roller coaster named The Bat that currently operates at Kings Island.
The Bat we have now originally opened in 1993 as Top Gun, and is a descendant of the original Bat installed in 1981. Both rides were designed and built by the same manufacturer, Aerodynamics. The current Bat was renamed Flight Deck in 2006, and then renamed again in 2014 to The Bat, to pay homage to the original Bat. While the 1981 edition of The Bat was the world's first permanent installation of a suspended roller coaster, it was not technically the world's first suspended roller coaster.
Suspended roller coasters actually date all the way back to the early 1900s. In 1902, Bisbee's Spiral Airship debuted in Long Beach, California as the first suspended roller coaster in history. I'm unsure how tall or fast the attraction was, as little documentation about the ride exists, but the entire layout seemed to consist of a long continuous helix, which descended from the top of the lift hill all the way to the ground. The ride would operate until 1915. The second known attempt at a suspended roller coaster would come during the 1970s as Alpenflug.
which opened for the 1975 Munich Oktoberfest. Alpenflug was designed and manufactured by Messerschmitt, a German aircraft manufacturing company. Werner Stengel, one of the most famous roller coaster designers, provided design calculations for the ride as well.
However, Messerschmitt ignored Stengel's calculations to bank the turns of the ride, meaning all the high-speed turns that trains would maneuver through were flat, which would exert a high amount of forces on the structure and trains. The move was done to save costs. Since designing and manufacturing the banked track would have been so much more expensive.
Werner Stengel was actually so angered by this decision that he left the project altogether. Alpenflug would successfully operate for the 1975 fair, but a heavy amount of structural damage was found throughout the ride, which would force the attraction to be shut down for good. This structural damage would have most likely been avoided if Messerschmitt had listened to Werner Stengel and banked the turns of the ride, but their cost-saving decision would ultimately doom the attraction.
On April 29th of 1972, Kings Island would officially open its doors for the general public. The park was built in the town of Mason, Ohio, and serves the Cincinnati, Ohio area. The park was built by the Taft Broadcasting Network, and was part of a plan to move and expand the Coney Island Amusement Park. Coney Island was a popular amusement park in the area that had operated for decades, but its location on the Ohio River made it victim to multiple flooding incidents which prompted the move. On opening day, Kings Island's premier roller coaster was the Racer, which still operates to this day.
The attraction stands 88 feet. or 27 meters tall and features two tracks for racing and was designed by John C. Allen, a legendary wooden roller coaster designer. The ride is often considered as the roller coaster that relaunched the roller coaster renaissance and brought back demand for new roller coasters in the United States. King's Island would prove to be successful and attracted a healthy number of visitors. The park would receive lots of good publicity after it was featured on two TV shows that were played across the entire United States, The Partridge Family in 1972 and The Brady Bunch in 1973. As the 1970s continued, looping roller coasters had become the rage after the first modern-day looping roller coaster, Corkscrew, opened in 1975 at Knott's Bray Farm in Buena Park, California.
Manufactured by Aerodynamics, the ride featured a double corkscrew that inverted riders twice. In 1977, Kings Island would join the looping roller coaster hype train and install the Screamin'Demon, a looping shuttle roller coaster built by Aerodynamics. Riders would launch out of the station and down a 47-foot or 14-meter drive into a vertical loop.
After climbing up a hill, the ride would launch again and repeat the course backwards. Screamin'Demon would operate at Kings Island until 1987 and would help to further establish the park's relationship with aerodynamics, who would go on to design and manufacture the bat. As many of you may know, Kings Island would go on to install the Beast in 1979, an absolutely massive and legendary wooden roller coaster that still stands today as the longest wooden roller coaster ever built. The Beast absolutely catapulted Kings Island's popularity and has forever cemented the park as one of the ultimate roller coaster destinations in the United States. For more information on The Beast, be sure to check out my video on the ride linked in the iCard above or the description below.
To follow up the success of The Beast, Kings Island looked to install another jaw-dropping attraction that would shock the general public, and the park turned to amusement ride manufacturer Aerodynamics. By the 1970s, Aerodynamics had established themselves as the premier amusement ride manufacturer. Originally under the name Arrow Development, the company was first established in 1945 and got their start producing machine tool and replacement parts for trucks. The company went on to work with the U.S. Navy and NASA.
Just after a few years, the company began to produce small amusement rides. Starting in 1953, Arrow began working with Walt Disney to help produce rides for the upcoming Disneyland in Anaheim, California. On Disneyland's opening day in 1955, Arrow had built the Mad Tea Party, King Arthur Carousel, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Dumbbell the Flying Elephant, Casey Jr.
Circus Train, and Snow White's Scary Adventures. In 1959, Arrow would produce the world's first tubular steel-tracked roller coaster, meaning the rails of the coaster were built with tubular steel for the very first time, and this is essentially what all modern-day steel roller coasters are built with now. The technology was incorporated into the Matterhorn bobsleds, which opened at Disneyland in 1959 and still operates to this day.
Matterhorn Bobsleds would help grow Arrow from a developer of small amusement rides to also the world's premier roller coaster manufacturing firm. In 1966, Arrow opened their first mine train style roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas. The ride went by the name Runaway Mine Train and featured mine cart style trains and theming. The ride took guests along three lift hills and through several tunnels throughout its 2,485 feet or 757 meters of track.
Arrow would go on to produce over a dozen more mine train roller coasters for amusement parks all over the world. During the 1970s, Arrow would later go on to produce looping roller coasters, like Corkscrew at Knott's Berry Farm, the world's first modern-day looping roller coaster that I mentioned earlier. Arrow also opened Corkscrew at Cedar Point in 1976, which was the world's first roller coaster to feature three inversions, including a vertical loop.
Corkscrew, however, was not the first modern-day roller coaster to feature a vertical loop. That ride would be Revolution at Six Flags Magic Mountain. which also opened in 1976. Revolution was built by Schwarzkopf, another premier roller coaster manufacturing firm from that era.
Arrow kept up with their innovation and began working on their next concept, a roller coaster in which riders were suspended beneath the tracks and the cars would freely swing during turns. Appropriately named the suspended roller coaster, Arrow got to work on developing different models to test the idea, both scale size and life size. The scale size model here even featured a corkscrew. You can see the small train violently whipping through the inversion. Arrow went on to build a full-size prototype of the attraction, which featured different track designs as they tested the concept.
The trains only consisted of one car, and the turns were unbanked. It even looks like Arrow built another life-size prototype that did feature a corkscrew, as well as the actual track and support design that Arrow went with for the ride model. I'm very curious how that life-size corkscrew worked out. In 1978, Kings Island executives took a visit to Arrow's design facility in Mountain View, California, and took a ride on the working prototype. Thrilled by the new attraction, Kings Island signed a deal with Arrow to build a full-size suspended roller coaster for their park.
Arrow got to work and began developing the suspended roller coaster further to get the concept ready for a park installation. This would lead to the installation of the Bat. It took over 18 months to design the Bat once the agreement was signed in 1978, and then another two years to manufacture the ride components and structure, ship them to Kings Island, and construct the attraction.
During the 1980 season, Vertical construction of the bat began at Kings Island and guests were reportedly extremely confused at the time Most people had never heard of or seen a suspended roller coaster. So the entire ride basically looked upside down It wasn't until October 29th of 1980 that Kings Island officially announced the attraction and revealed what they had been working on construction of the bat will continue after the announcement and vertical construction of the ride would be completed just one month later in November of 1980 in total the ride required an immense amount of steel materials Over one mile of drilling was done to dig the caissons for the footers. Over 2.5 million pounds of concrete were used for the concrete footers.
100,000 steel anchor bolts were used to secure the 162 support columns. And 1 million pounds of tubular steel were used for all the track and supports. Following construction, a state-of-the-art computer system was installed to monitor the ride's mechanical and safety systems. Cincinnati Millicron provided their state-of-the-art Maximizer to handle the computing processes.
62 proximity sensors were installed around the ride and were connected to the Maximizer using 52,000 feet or about 15,850 meters of copper wire. Aerodynamics also produced the three trains that would run on the bat. Each train would consist of seven cars. Aero sculpted each car so that they resembled the wings of a bat.
The Kings Island Arts Department would later supply a bat head to decorate the front of each train. The ride began testing on April 4th of 1981. and the park announced that the official opening day would take place later that month on April 26th. All in all, the attraction had cost the park 3.8 million US dollars, or about 10.7 million US dollars in today's currency.
Now to the public, the attraction looked like it was ready to go, but in reality, this was far from the actual case. Unknown to most, Kings Island were already having major issues with the computer system, specifically the safety monitoring system installed on the ride. The system was extremely sensitive and was prone to shutting down the ride even if only one train was on the track.
This made the use of all three trains at the same time nearly impossible. Trains were also traveling the track much faster than they were designed to. This led to much more aggressive side-to-side swinging with the cars, which could lead to structural issues with both the trains as well as the track and supports.
Arrow would install shock absorbers underneath the heavy steel chassis to help minimize the swinging as best as they could. Knowing that the ride would still be having issues on opening day, Kings Island announced that guests should expect the ride to experience inconsistent operations due to the fact the ride was a prototype attraction. The park continued to build hype around the bat and marketed the ride all they could.
The TV commercial I played at the beginning of the video circulated the TV channels in the area, building up more and more hype. On April 22nd of 1981, the bat had its media day, and then on April 26th, the ride opened to the general public as planned. From what I hear, the ride actually operated fairly consistently for the first several weeks of operation.
The park was only open on weekends during the spring, so the bat was able to rest on weekdays, which probably helped a lot. The only issue the ride suffered from were random shutdowns caused by the oversensitive safety system. The bat was also a huge hit with park guests. Riders absolutely loved the attraction, and the coaster drew a massive amount of attention. Even with the ride's pretty massive queue house, it was common for the ride's line to stretch all the way to the racer's entrance.
However, things started to get ugly once the summer season approached, and the ride began running every single day. The ride's operations became extremely sporadic. It was common for the ride to shut down several times throughout the day.
and constant tweaks were needed to keep it going. The violent swinging of the cars was causing the shock absorbers to wear out much faster than anticipated, and it became necessary to replace the absorbers every single day. The shock absorbers are the yellow columns located at the back of each car. Watching this video here, you can hear the cars as they swing past the maximum swing amount.
To help compensate, Arrow added more pairs of shock absorbers to each car, to help reduce the stress on each absorber. The safety system in Maximizer also continued to act up and would sporadically shut down the ride. Apparently, the system could cause the ride to quote unquote lock up, which required a complete track survey by engineers and a reboot of the entire safety system before the ride could resume operations.
If the shutdown occurred while guests were on the coaster, the trains would stall in the lift hills and riders would have to be manually evacuated from the trains and walk down the staircases. Additionally, the trains were having issues engaging the lift hills, specifically in the second lift hill. It was common for the chain dog, the mechanical component of the trains that connects to the lift chains, to not align with the lift chain properly when engaging the lift hills.
This caused the chain dogs to bend or completely snap off. The second lift hill was more of an issue than the first lift hill because trains entered the lift at speed, while cars were swinging. The 1981 season continued on as the park and aerodynamics struggled to keep the bat operating.
Because of the sporadic operations, the line to get on the attraction usually took upwards of three hours. It was also very common for the ride to open for the day late. and closed for the day after a breakdown. While guests who got to experience the ride loved it, many did not get their chance to ride it and were extremely angered. Kings Island would have to give out many free tickets to anger guests who did not get to ride the temperamental attraction.
On July 24th of 1981, the bat experienced its first multi-day shutdown when the park and Aerodynamics decided to address some of the issues that had been plaguing the attraction's operations. Arrow attempted to address issues with trains misaligning into the second lift tilt and installed modified chain dogs on the trains as well. Portions of the ride and trains were also repainted to cover up patches of paint that had chipped away. The ride reopened four days later on July 28th and still operated inconsistently. I hear that the ride spent over 30% of its time closed due to operational issues.
For people like me who were not around when the bat existed, this is quite a lot of downtime. So try to picture as if you were waiting in line for King N'Ka or Top Thrill Dragster, which are both known for having excessive amounts of downtime. To help keep the bat operating, A team of engineers from Kings Island and Aerodynamics were staffed at the ride every single day so that they could help keep the ride operational. To add to the fun, problems with the ride's braking system also began to arise. The Bat featured a very poorly designed brake system, where the brakes applied to the swinging cars of the train.
Instead of braking, the brakes applied to the swinging cars of the train. of the stationary steel chassis above that were fixed in position to the track. This meant that the brake calipers were located below the trains and the swinging cars had a metal fin at the bottom.
In order to actually slow down, the swinging cars would have to stop swinging for the brake run and properly line up with the brake calipers. From there, the brake calipers could clamp against the metal fins and slow down the train. You can see here how Arrow designed the track of the bat to allow the train to naturally slow down significantly before entering the brake run.
Trains would enter the brake run following a turn. So guide rails were positioned underneath the trains to help prevent any swinging and guide the cars properly into the brake calipers. The cars even had little wheels or pads in the sides of them that contacted the guide rails. But even with these design precautions, it was common for the trains to still not align with the brake calipers.
This would cause the brake fins to bend or break off the trains. And when the brakes did work, the brakes did not apply to the heaviest part of the train. The steel chassis at the top of the trains that hugged the actual track were the heaviest part of the train.
So the stopping force of the brakes would have to pass through the swinging cars, through the steel bars that held the cars to the chassis, and then to the actual steel chassis, which put a tremendous amount of force on the frames and carriages of the trains. To help address this issue, the ride was shut down again on August 20th of 1981 for an extended period of time. In a public address, Kings Island finally put public blame on Aerodynamics for the inconsistent operations of the ride.
They said, quote unquote, because we are committed to providing the best entertainment value possible. no date for reopening of the ride will be set until the ride manufacturer can guarantee consistent operation. Arrow would spend three weeks addressing issues with the ride's brakes. Apparently, Arrow were able to slow down the speed of the ride, probably by using a different type of wheel compound for the running wheels. This helped the trains to enter the brake run at a slower speed than before.
The guide rails were also reprofiled to better control the swinging of the cars before the final brake run, and the brake run itself was extended by having more brakes added to it. The ride reopened for Labor Day weekend that year. and continued to operate inconsistently until the park finally closed for the season that fall. With the ride now closed for the off-season, Aero engineers began to address the long list of issues. The trains were taken apart and rebuilt like a normal roller coaster, but almost all of the mechanical components were replaced with new parts, like the shocks, struts, axles, and brake fins.
The brake calipers were also replaced during the off-season. To provide a more comfortable experience for riders, the over-the-shoulder restraints were replaced with a different version to help alleviate the headbanging found on the ride. The park also attempted to address issues with the computer system by reviewing and addressing the entire system and placement of sensors. To help strengthen the structure, additional stress cables were added to the support structure to help defer stresses from the outer poles of the helixes on support columns. At this point, I'm sure Kings Island and Aerodynamics were praying that this permanently fixed the coaster.
Well, the problems continued. The bat opened for its second season in the spring of 1982 and continued to have temper tantrums day after day. After just four weeks of weekend-only operations, the ride was shut down on May 21st of 1982 due to an undisclosed mechanical malfunction.
The park later announced on May 27th that the ride would be shut down for at least another month, as it was still not operating to standards guaranteed by the manufacturer. Arrow began to analyze the ride as they got ready to perform another round of fixes. It was determined that the ride was already beginning to show significant structural wear due to the unbanked turns found throughout the ride.
On any roller coaster. Banked turns allow ride vehicles to properly maneuver through a turn and also properly apply forces to the structure. With unbanked turns, the trains pull sideways on the track and structure. Picture if you were to drive your car very fast around a sharp corner, then imagine that all the lateral forces exerted on you and the car would be applied to the structure of the roller coaster. So for the bad, all these lateral forces were actually weakening the welded joints where the track piece is attached to the supports.
The trains were essentially ripping at the joints and almost forcing the track to snap off the welds. Almost as if the trains were in the process of actually banking the track on the ride themselves. It was at this point that Kings Island had lost their confidence in the bat to safely operate at all.
I'm not entirely sure why Arrow did not bank the turns on the bat. From what I hear from Messerschmitt and Alpenflug, the company did it to save on cost. But Messerschmitt did not specialize on roller coasters, whereas Arrow had built dozens of roller coasters before building the bat, so you'd think they'd have known better. I figure one reason that Arrow did not bank the track was because the swinging of the cars would allow riders to comfortably head through a curb.
since the cars would take care of the banking. But I guess they did not properly account for the stresses the trains would then place on the track and structure because of their decision. The ride also ran faster than it was designed to, which probably did not help either.
On June 3rd of 1982, the park would announce to the public that the BAT would be closed indefinitely. The BATSAT closed for the remainder of the 1982 season, which blows my mind. This was a brand new roller coaster that the park had just paid several million dollars for. They had basically purchased an extremely expensive prototype of a lawn ornament. During the time the BATSAT closed, King's Island and Arrow were in the process of figuring out what they could do.
Because King's Island had signed a development agreement with Arrow to help develop the entire suspended roller coaster model, I don't believe the repairs necessary for the ride were free. So King's Island would have to pay for the cost of fixing Arrow's mistakes, and I'm sure the park had already lost a lot of money trying to keep the bat operating already, so to say Kings Island were probably frustrated over the situation is probably an understatement. But later on, I guess some sort of agreement was reached, as Arrow began working on the coaster to help remedy another solution. To lighten the load on the structure, Arrow shortened the trains from 7 cars to 6 cars. They also added additional shock absorbers to the cars, bringing the total number of absorbers to 6 per car.
And keep in mind, the ride was originally designed to swing freely, without the use of any shock absorbers. The additional shock absorbers would further help to minimize the swinging of the car so that less force is placed on the structure. The structure itself was also strengthened. All the well joints were strengthened and a substantial amount of additional supports were added throughout the ride. Arrow also installed newer and more powerful lift motors.
Overall, Arrow reduced the weight of the trains and also slowed them down as they traversed through the course. They further limited the swinging on the cars and they also strengthened the structure further. The bat did not reopen for the start of the 1983 season.
but Kings Island shocked the general public later that year when they announced that the ride would be reopening the weekend of May 21st. The ride resumed operations, and against all hopes, continued to operate extremely temperamentally. The ride would close again in July of that year for another extended period of downtime, but reopened a few weeks later on July 23rd.
The coaster would operate for another few weeks before shutting down again during the first week of August of 1983. To most, this just seemed like another technical issue where the ride closed for the remainder of the day, which was very common for the bat. But little did everyone know that this would be the last day that the bat would ever operate. The ride sat closed for the remainder of the 1983 season, and empty trains would periodically be seen circulating the attraction.
But the ride never reopened. During that off-season, the park talked with Arrow further about what could save the coaster. Arrow had determined that the only way to save the ride would be to bank the turns and to also relocate the braking system to above the train.
And this would require an extremely expensive rebuild of the attraction. Unfortunately, Kings Island did not push through with these modifications as they had already spent so much money on the ride and did not wish to reinvest even more money into a broken roller coaster. The ride would continue to sit closed through the entire 1984 season and finally on November 6th of that year, Kings Island announced that the bat would be taken down and removed from the park.
The official reason was that modifications to improve the reliability of the traction would have been far too expensive. So unfortunately for Kings Island, the bat was undeniably a failure. Now even though the park lost the bat in 1984, 1984 wasn't all that bad for Kings Island.
The park would open King Cobra in the spring of that year, the world's first true installation of a stand-up roller coaster. Up until that point, there hadn't been a stand-up roller coaster designed from the ground up. Parks had only taken their previously existing roller coasters and added stand-up trains to them.
The troubles with operating the bat also led to Backwards Racer during the 1982 season. To help make up for the unreliability of their brand new attraction, Kings Island flipped the trains on one track of the racer backwards. Backwards Racer was a hit and proved to be extremely popular with guests. Kings Island would operate the racer backwards from 1982 until 2008, when Cedar Fair, the new owners of Kings Island, flipped the train's background to forward. And to make up for the failure of the Bat, Aerodynamics built Vortex, the park's former multi-looping roller coaster, entirely for free.
The ride opened in 1987 and thrilled millions upon millions of guests before it was sadly shut down at the end of 2019. Vortex was actually built in the same plot of land that the Bat was, and it reused the Bat Station building. I'm a big fan of aero looping roller coasters and Vortex was actually my favorite aero looper, RIP Vortex. Now for aero's suspended roller coaster model, the bat allowed aero to learn from their mistakes and develop a better ride model without the design flaws found on the bat. In 1984, aero opened XLR8 at Six Flags Astroland and Big Bad Wolf at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, two successful suspended roller coasters.
The rides featured bank track around the turns and a redesigned brake system where the brakes were relocated to above the trains. I never got to ride XLR8. But I did get to ride Big Bad Wolf and man was that a special ride Comment down below if you'd like me to do a detailed video about Big Bad Wolf The rides also featured a new alignment system to keep trains in place while inside the station or on lift hills With the brake fins now relocated to the top of the steel chassis the bottom of the swinging cars featured guide wheels instead The guide wheels would ride inside a steel trough while inside the station or during lift hills to keep cars from swinging Also, if the suspended roller coaster featured two lift hills like on the bat A break run was placed before the second lift tilt to allow the cars to stop swinging before engaging that lift.
The Bat did not have a break run before the second lift tilt and the trains came swinging into the lift, which caused a lot of alignment issues. Arrow would continue to sell more suspended roller coasters and opened a total of 10 of them during the 1980s and 1990s. Many of these suspended roller coasters are still in operation, like Iron Dragon at Cedar Point, Ninja at Six Flags Magic Mountain, Vampire at Chessington World of Adventures, Vortex at Canada's Wonderland, and the new Bat that operates at Kings Island. While these coasters have certainly showed their age, and many of them have closed due to structural issues, Arrow did eventually develop a successful version of the Suspended Roller Coaster.
But Kings Island unfortunately had to pay the price of getting the Suspended Roller Coaster truly off the ground. The park had signed a development agreement with Arrow for the Suspended Roller Coaster, and Arrow unfortunately delivered a very faulty prototype to the park. The ba- That was truly a public testing ground of Aero's concept that unfortunately failed in front of the eyes of millions of people. Only 1.8 million people got to ride the Bat during a short run at Kings Island that lasted on and off for three years. Now just for perspective, if the ride had operated consistently, the Bat probably would have given over 2 million rides in just its first year of operation alone, as the ride had a theoretical capacity of over 2,000 riders per hour.
Now this wouldn't be an episode of Problematic Roller Coasters without talking about block zones, so let's talk about the block zones found on the Bat before the closeout of the video. For anyone who is unfamiliar, a block zone is a section of ride that only one train may occupy. At the end of a block zone is a method to stop a train in case the block zone ahead is occupied.
This is the safety system that prevents roller coaster trains from colliding with one another. It appears that the bat had four block zones. Those block zones were the station, first lift hill which was probably called the A block, then the second lift hill which was probably called the B block, and then the final brake run before the station that was probably named the C block.
These four block zones are what allowed three trains at max to safely cycle around the track at any given time. Knowing how old arrows were programmed, the ride was most likely able to stack one train in the final brake run. But if operators were slow and did not dispatch a train from the station in time, the train ascending the second lift would have to block check at the top of the second lift hill, which would most likely shut down the ride.
This situation would be called a C-Set, where the train in B block, aka the second lift hill, is forced to stop before entering the C block, because C block is still occupied with the train sitting in the final brake run. For more information on how old aeroblock zones work, please check out my video on Magnum XL 200 at Cedar Point, linked above in the i-card or below in the description. Now I haven't addressed this yet in a video, but I think it's really off when a manufacturer gives a theoretical hourly capacity that isn't divisible by the actual train count. If you take 2,000 riders per hour and divide that number by 28 riders per train, you get 71.43 trains.
Now you obviously can't dispatch.43 trains, so I'm going to round down to 71 trains per hour at most can be dispatched, which leads to a true hourly capacity of 1,988 riders per hour, which is just shy of 2,000. That would mean a train would have to be dispatched from the station every 50.7 seconds to make that happen, and when the bat was actually operating with all three trains, I'm sure the ride crews tried to stay as close to that target as possible, because if they dispatched a train too late, they would set up a train on the second lift hill and probably shut down the ride. And with the lack of a brake run in the middle of the ride before the second lift hill, this probably meant that operators had to be really fast. Although it's probably a good thing that the Bat did not have a brake run before the second lift hill, as the brakes on the ride were so problematic that having a second brake run would probably have doubled the amount of brake run issues with the ride.
And besides a second brake run causing more problems, the original design and idea for the Bat probably would have presented even more problems. This was the original design for the Bat, and supposedly it featured two upside down cork screws. So the corkscrews we saw in the initial suspended roller coaster prototypes were planned for the bat.
Looking here at this picture, this is one of the cars that was built for the bat. You can see the bat wings on the side. But because Aero could not get the swing in consistent enough to make the corkscrews reliable, they were cut from the ride's design.
If the ride had opened with the two corkscrews, I think the situation at the bat would have been ten times worse than it already was. The corkscrews may have actually proved to be deadly, since they rely on the train to run fast enough into them in order to cause enough rotational force for the cars to swing through the inversion. If the ride was running too slow, the cars may have not rotated fully, which would have led to major damage to the trains as well as possible injury or even death for riders.
As a former ride operator, I have seen the variation with how fast a ride can cycle the track. Take a look at these two side-by-side videos of El Toro at Six Flags Great Adventure to get a grasp of what I mean. Now thankfully, because the Bat did not have corkscrews, the ride was only unreliable.
The corkscrews probably would have made the ride both unreliable and also deadly. But contrary to urban myth, Not a single person was ever injured or killed on the bat. While the ride certainly had a lot of mechanical issues, Kings Island and Arrow never operated the coaster when riders could have been harmed.
I think the only issue that may have eventually put riders in harm's way is when the coaster began to have structural issues in 1982. But both Arrow and Kings Island closed the attraction before they got too out of hand, and only allowed riders to re-board the attraction once modifications were made. So that will conclude this episode of Problematic Roller Coasters. The Bat was truly a very poorly designed roller coaster, but its problems taught Arrow how to build a proper suspended roller coaster, which allowed the company to produce nine more versions of the ride for parks all around the world.
But unfortunately for Kings Island, they had to pay the price of building the prototype, which was a complete nightmare from a public perspective. For those of you who got the rare chance to ride the Bat, I am truly jealous, as the ride looked absolutely wild. It was probably one of the best suspended roller coasters ever built, from a ride experience at least.
Definitely not from an operating standpoint. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed this video, and I hope you learned something new. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you get notified the next time I post a video.
Also, be sure to check out the El Toro Ryan merchandise store on Amazon if you want to support what we do here. Thank you for watching, everyone. Peace.