The headline basically says it all – in Long Island New York at an FEC called Fun Zone Amusements(link to a video of the arcade on youtube) a father and daughter were trapped in a flight simulator game for about 20 minutes when the ride failed. They were apparently stuck in either an upside-down or reclining position before being rescued by the local fire department. The name of the simulator wasn’t mentioned and fortunately no one was hurt.
This is the disadvantage of large simulators of course – if they decide to stop failing during operation it can lead to inconvenience or something worse depending on the ride, which goes on to stress maintanence.
[Via Newsday] [Discuss on the Forum]
Yep..Good ol’ Funzone! We went there for a video tour a while back, I’m pretty sure I got the motion ride in the video (Not in motion)
The ride is just called The Max according to the paper. On the picture they show it says Max Flight VR 2000, it’s a big red machine. I never really saw it in operation, so I never knew the thing went upside down.
The website story is also shorter. They said they had FOUR rescue cars as a “Precaution”
To be honest, I’m not surprised it happened. The whole arcade is in disrepair. None of the games work right, that’s something you don’t see in the video. They have the 32X Star Wars arcade game and the controls are reversed and they’ve NEVER been fixed.
They use the new school of arcade operation. Don’t put an out of order sign on the game, just keep it on and maybe you’ll be lucky if some schmuck will drop a token in.
They also have one of the only Rock-A-Fire Explosion Bands that doesn’t really work, they pretty much just sway from side to side, they don’t really sing like they used too.
Hopefully this is a wake up call and they’ll fix more of their stuff to keep everybody safe.
OMG and I thought the stories of people getting stuck in the R360 were bad, at least that one had safety measures and you could get a person out if you really had to, but you had to know how to use them, basically you could manually rotate the cabinet by hand by turning some wheels to get it right side up and the harness had a manual release key, theres a youtube video on this out there. Sega built some extensive safety measures into that one so if something happened like a power outage, the person could get out without harm.
I would think a modern sim like the Maxflight would have safety measures built in, perhaps the ops weren’t trained in using them, I have no idea, but if the R360 had a way to get people out, I would think this would have too.
The unfortunate thing is that if there is a power outage, which is known to happen in NYC especially in the summer, large motion simulators will cease with people stuck in them, its just a risk you take when you get on one of these rides. There is also the risk of mechanical failure with a large machine like this with lots of moving parts, and if your strapped in with a harness on an upside down going ride, its not easy to get out on your own.
Haw, gotta love stories like that. 8*)
They have some awesome equipment in that arcade, shame none of it works. 8*(
The world first SCARE simulator :p
When I went to France years ago there was a very fat (and intensively dull guy who talked about nothing but programming all day) who went on the R360 split his trousers from front to back. It was hilarious. He was walking around clutching his crotch till we got back home.