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Flight Commander


flightoffear1996
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this is a link to a used rides website. the link is to a picture of a ride for sale by a park. the ride is just like flight commander, and is made by intamin. I'm not sure if this is our flight commander or not, but i doubt it is, even though i dont know what happend to ours. heres the link:

http://www.italintl.com/spectac/s26.htm

for $200,000 it can be yours!

:cowboy:

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You can tell pretty well from the pictures the size of it...as I recall it didn't go very fast at all. I know I rode it and it wasn't a favorite. Skylab was way better.

My flight commander picture hunt is drawing to a close, I'll find one when I'm not looking for it - although I did find my 1987 brochure (featuring the NEW Vortex), 1987 Kings Island Stationery pad, ticket stubs from '97 ($25.95), and a bunch of pics from 1992, including the monorail, Yogi, and a couple shots off the Eiffel Tower that you can't even see Flight Commander in. :)

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Ok, I have a friend that lives in North Yorkshire, he wrote me an email on the subject awhile back. Here it is...

Hi dane

My name is Tom. I am a 20 year old student. I live in england. I work in a theme park called flamingo land which is in north yorkshire. I operate a ride called top gun which i believe used to be called FLIGHT COMMANDER-very posh! I think you'll probably know what ride i mean! I'm really interested to find out stuff about it. It would be interesting to hear what info you got about it. I hear a women called Candy Taylor died on the ride when it was at pki. I think she was a little drunk? I hear she fell 60 feet. Its not that high in england. I'd say it was about 40 feet high in england. I'm interested find out if the platform to flight commander was similar to how it is at flamingo land. At flamingo land there is a circular concrete platform. Either side of the concrete platform there are slanting metal fences to prevent the customers getting into the center bit and to prevent them getting onto the concrete platform from the exterior.In England top gun has an air line which extends from the cetre piece. This is used to manually release the harnesses.Did you have an air line to do this? Did you have three compressers to generate the air?

What i like about top gun is the amount of money i get off the ride every day when people go upside down. I get a different mobile phone every day! Its ****in ace!

The ride now is kind of rusty. It seems like every day one of the cars breaks down with either a gondola moter failure or a gondola upright position failure! It broke down twice today with turning motor failures. Do you understand these failures. Would be interesting if you did! All of the gondola's can still turn upside down but only 5 gondola's can still go in and out. Shame really, would have been a really good ride in all its glory! I get people complaining every day asking me why most of them don't go in and out! Have you got any pics of it when it was in the u.s. Could send you a pic to show you what it looks like now if you like?

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Nice pics! you know how fast it went or how high it went

Flight Commander wasn't fast. All of the cars were raised 60 feet, according to Park literature, and then began to rotate around the tower. Once you were at the highest point, you were then able to control the motion of your car. You could make it climb, have it dive back down, or flip it upside down. I think I'm one of the few who actually liked the ride. I was totally pumped up when I went to PGA about 4 years ago, they still had their version. It rode very differently from what I remember of Flight Commander. I think the ability to manuever the car had been toned down somewhat. Of course, now that I think about it, I believe Flight Commander also had some changes following the death. I'm surprised the ride lasted as long as it did after she came out. Sad as it may have been, the girl was heavily intoxicated. Being so lose and relaxed, she apparently slid to the side of the car when she tried to spin it upside down.

Someone else had posted something about how the loading platform was setup on our ride. I thought that was the neatest feature about it. Basically, the queue ended up running under the ride and a set of stairs brought you up to the loading platform. At that point, you were under the ride itself. Pretty cool and probably better for capacity. They could assign people to their car and already have them waiting to load while the ride was in motion. Man I wish I would have taken some pictures back then!

I can't seem to find ANY pictures of Flight Commander in my collection, the only thing I have is a folder with the logo on the front of it. If anyone would happen to stumble across some, post a link or something here! It was a cool concept for a ride, too bad it was so short lived.

- Todd

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very nice pic dane! our fearless leader comes through again! I dont remember the arms looking like that though. those almost look like the legs on the giant spider in the movie Wild Wild West. I wish we coudl get a close pic of what the cars and stuff look like now.... but again, thank you to dane and his source! :cowboy:

EDIT:

hey guys.. i did some more research. once i found out that the rides product name was actually the "flight trainer" i did a search for Intamin Flight Trainer on google, and got some good results. The best picture i could find was actually from the kings dominion model which was identical to ours. Here is the link.

http://members.aol.com/surfdancec/flighttrainer.htm

i'm tryin to find some more... but i dont think it will get much better than that. Knoots had a version of the ride called the XK-1 however i cannot find any pictures of theirs. I wish this ride was still around! :cowboy:

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I know i dont post much here, but im glad to see this topic. I was a fan of Flight commander ever since PKI, well KI at the time, had the ride installed. The first time I rode FC was on opening day, and it was CROWDED (obviously). The que line started on the left hand side of where the "Launch Pad" is today. As stated in a previous post, the "enterance" to the ride was really cool, it ran Under the concrete platform there is today. There were certain rows that you would stand on, and there were green gates that kept you from going up the ramps durning ride operation. After the accident, the ride was closed for a season..i still remember it like yesterday, the ride sitting there with the army green covers on all the cars. Im not sure if it was one, or 2 seasons that it was closed for , but i remember visiting it the next season, and it was opened..with the new features. I remember also, that the new features added to the ride, was in the car was a Joystick, and that was what you used to controll your pod during operation. Part of the flaw that resulted in Mrs. Taylors death was that you could flip the car upsidedown, and it would stay there untill you moved the joystick again. This was fixed by a timer on the ride to automatically flip you back up again.

A few visits ago, Therickster and I went to the Launch Pad, Schmoozed up the ride op a bit (since no one was there) and she let us look around at the ride, the old que and the like). Now, you can only see the old poles from the queline, and there is very little left of the "underground station" because they have filled it in with concrete.

Again, i was stupid during this time period (since i was 12) and didnt even THINK to take pictures. and I should of when i was able to see the old ques and stuff.

oh well, we can probably see it at PKI-C day this weekend

m@ilman

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