Predator at Six Flags Darien Lake is a shockingly great wood coaster. Although it’s more of a hybrid coaster today with the installation of Titan Track on about 80% of the course. However, the Titan Track makes the train run like butter and the bumpy last 20% without it actually serves as a reminder of what a great decision the retrofit was. The retrofit has been a 5 year process with the remainder of the conversion scheduled to happen the offseason. Once that is complete this could be one of the best wood hybrid rides anywhere.

THRILLZ, the indoor adventure amusement park, has opened in Atlanta and with it comes a new coaster credit for Georgia. TRILLZ is located in the Doraville area in Northwest Atlanta near the intersection of Interstate 85 and 285 and joins the company’s other parks in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. The new indoor coaster is an SBF Visa, so nothing intense, but still a lot of fun. The 56,000 square foot park also has several other rides including a 40 foot drop tower, the Rush 360 inverting pendulum ride, a VR coaster and numerous slides and obstacles.

When most people think “launch coaster” they think LSM (Linear Synchronous Motor) or magnetic launch. However, before this there was another system that was ingenious for its time and worked almost as well, a flywheel launch. A flywheel is a heavy, rapidly spinning wheel that can store kinetic energy and release it in a quick burst. In the case of a roller coaster, this allows a slingshotting of the train with rapid acceleration. There aren’t too many of these out there anymore, but one of the best is Motocoaster at Six Flags Darien Lake.o

Danish athlete Ida Mathilde Steensgaard completed the world’s first moving obstacle course built inside a rotating Ferris wheel. The stunt was sponsored by Red Bull and took place at Odense Harbour in Denmark. Steensgaard had to clear six custom-built obstacles while the Ferris wheel actively rotated. She is a two-time Obstacle Course Racing (OCR) world champion and the obstacle course was specially built into the 98-foot-high (30-metre) Ferris wheel. What’s also interesting is that the skills she showed are the same techniques used by fire departments for an emergency rescue from a Ferris wheel.

It’s only in testing, but the neighbors of Universal Studios Hollywood are already complaining about the noise from the new Fast and Furious roller coaster, more specifically the screams. It now appears mitigating those screams permeating across the Lakeside Golf Course to the historic Toluca Lake Neighborhood will delay the opening. Universal Studios Hollywood is somewhat unique in that it is near to some residential areas and has not had an outdoor coaster like this before. NBCUniversal has publicly outlined a number of steps to address noise, including installing 900 feet of sound walls, using pea gravel to help quiet the track and designing the coaster cars to rotate so screams won’t always face the neighborhood. Apparently these steps aren’t doing the trick for some neighbors who claim to hear screams every 30-40 seconds now. It appears there may be more walls coming and potentially programming changes to turn riders more away from the neighborhood.