Leviathan reliability

[Vidgamer]

I am not sure that the existing Atlantis review thread is an appropriate place to discuss Leviathans troubled launch anymore.

7news Gold Coast is reporting that passengers got stuck on the lift hill today for Leviathan. This is quite a common occurrence but it is quite clear that Leviathan is struggling with reliability issues. 
 

It seems every day this month Leviathan has opened late, or not at all, or opened late and then stopped working throughout the day. 
 

I think new coasters will always have some form of teething issues, but it feels like Leviathans are a bit more frequent than most coasters.

is it worth Seaworld taking the ride back into maintenance in Feb to fix these issues? What are some of the possible reasons for the awkward issues.  

Edited January 13, 2023 by Vidgamer

[rappa]

This is pure speculation but a couple ideas (the 1st one is a bit more rooted in educated knowledge):

1- If the ride was running 2 trains, something may have delayed the train on the brake run being brought into the station. This would cause the lift hill to time out and stop.
I'm not sure what SWs Ops procedures are but if they aren't allowed to re-start the lift (its not standard ops mode) with people on that would be an evac.
Alternate possibility is something in the station faulted causing the ride to require maintenance mode to reset it. They can't do that with guests on so this would also require en evac.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible to have an evac on the lift when nothing is actually wrong with the lift at all.

 

2-A wooden coaster, the maintenance and checks of, and all that's related is totally new to the park. The late openings are more than likely due to a late handover from maintenance to ops. I think we'll find as the brand new to this maintenance team finds their groove with the ride the late openings will be less and less frequent.

 

Thats just my 2 cents on those two matters. I have nothing to add about why it may be stopping during the day, but could be part of the above.

Our rules here are pretty strict, something as trivial as a fault reset in other parts of the world, requires an evac of guests here and entire restart of daily opening checks.
Where as Disney will pump trains on and off a ride at will by the operators, in Australia this requires the maintenance team and a ride shutdown.
There are pros and cons to both, it may seem like over the top and a capacity killer, but also it means you don't have an incident like on the Smiller at Alton Towers happening.

[REGIE]

Wooden coasters probably are operated quite differently to steel coasters and there is only really 3 wooden coasters in Australia and 2 of them are very vintage so there is no wooden coaster operators they could hire in Australia so the whole team needs training. That might be why it opened later.

[Dean Barnett]

32 minutes ago, rappa said:

Where as Disney will pump trains on and off a ride at will by the operators, in Australia this requires the maintenance team and a ride shutdown.
There are pros and cons to both, it may seem like over the top and a capacity killer, but also it means you don't have an incident like on the Smiller at Alton Towers happening.

The Smiler incident was caused by a maintenance team member forcing the continuation of the ride. 

[New display name]

7 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

The Smiler incident was caused by a maintenance team member forcing the continuation of the ride. 

That is what was being alluded to.

[rappa]

13 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

The Smiler incident was caused by a maintenance team member forcing the continuation of the ride. 

You mean like clearing a fault with guests on? Where have I heard that said recently?

[New display name]

It's running again so clearly it was nothing major.   

[joz]

 

 

1 hour ago, Vidgamer said:

It seems every day this month Leviathan has opened late, or not at all

I think 'seems' is quite an important word in this discussion. The last time Lev was down for the day was about a month ago. It has opened late, and had a few bits of downtime, but it also far more often than not ended the day open and cleared the queue (maybe 2 or 3 days in the month that its closed for the day before closing time?). So while it seems all these awful things, and it has had more downtime than is ideal, it's not as extreme as what you'd think reading parkz. Once you take that into account, there's not really much to it. 

[New display name]

If you take the launch shitshow out of it, every time I've witnessed Levi going down it's fixed with a push of a button and running of 1-2 empty cycles.

[TBoy]

The media are overreacting about Leviathan breaking down. A story is airing about it in Victoria on 9News.

Edited January 13, 2023 by TBoy

[Asdf]

3 hours ago, joz said:

I think 'seems' is quite an important word in this discussion. The last time Lev was down for the day was about a month ago.

Dunno where you get your info from, but I was there last Sunday and Lev was down the entire day. 

[REGIE]

They “seem” to be at least

[Levithian]

People need to remember it's not just mechanical inspections from their fitters/engineers like other rides, daily inspections would also have carpenters now too as repairs/maintenance/changes to the track or structure would likely happen daily. It's the nature of working with wood, especially in an outdoor environment, goes double for a new ride, triple when you consider the vibration/movement it experiences every day. 

I don't ever see it as a ride that will routinely open "on time", every day of the year. Even once all it's quirks are known and a good routine is established. It's going to be one of those rides that needs a little bit of tinkering all the time, so the occasional late opening is going to happen. 

[joz]

On 13/01/2023 at 8:00 PM, Asdf said:

Dunno where you get your info from, but I was there last Sunday and Lev was down the entire day. 

It did open. It was very late in the day, but it did open.

[REGIE]

Yes wooden coasters do need a lot of work and the Australian environment is very harsh on it but saying every wooden coaster in the world opens late is not really true either. 

Edited January 14, 2023 by REGIE

[TomiJ]

I liked this simple instrgram video they have put on all there social media post. The vid was uploadedI liked this simple instrgram video they have put on all social media platforms and accounts. The vid was uploaded yesterday yesterday. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CnYUMYmI3fW/?igshid=MDM4ZDc5MmU=

Edited January 15, 2023 by TomiJ
Added vid

[REGIE]

These are a great way for the parks to fight back from what the news and stuff is saying instead of just staying quiet. Even if only a tiny % actually look at the parks socials before visiting 

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

Our last big woodie - Bush Beast - was located in the Gold Rush section of Wonderland, which opened an hour later than the rest of the park. 

I remember often watching the carpenters walking the hills and bashing away with a hammer here and there even at 10:45 before they ran some test cycles. Those guys started morning checks at around 4am (though, they had two woodies to inspect)

It takes time.

[Guest 239]

Anecdotally I've noticed that the entire New Atlantis precinct seems to be having some teething issues but I wanted to see whether there was any evidence behind that. I wont go into the software, but for research purposes I created a little system that pings the rides every 15 minutes and returns the ride state between 10 AM and 6 PM. This data is only from the 18th - 24th of Jan so there are a lot of factors that could influence why the rides are down.
 

Ride Name	DOWN	OPEN	Total Pings	% DOWN
Vortex	161	63	224	72%
Trident	101	123	224	45%
Storm Coaster	25	199	224	11%
Leviathan	90	134	224	40%
Jet Rescue Coaster	69	155	224	31%
Castaway Bay - Battle Boats	29	195	224	13%

This is some comparison data for MW for the same time period:
 

Ride Name	OPEN	DOWN	Total Pings	% DOWN
DC Rivals HyperCoaster	197	27	224	12%
DOOMSDAY Destroyer	77	147	224	66%
GREEN LANTERN Coaster	88	136	224	61%
SCOOBY-DOO Spooky Coaster Next Generation	153	71	224	32%
SUPERMAN Escape	178	46	224	21%

[New display name]

This is next level stuff.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

Wonder why Vortex is having so many issues?

[Naazon]

When I went in late December, it appeared to be something to be a harness sensor tripping, but this is purely speculation based on what stage they were working on during the test cycles. The team just said 'sensor issue' to me and they announced the issue after 3 test cycles, reset the seats and then said it will be closed until further notice.

Edited January 25, 2023 by Naazon
Schools back so have to fix my spelling now.

[Spotty]

3 hours ago, Naazon said:

When I went in late December, it appeared to be something to be a harness sensor tripping, but this is purely speculation based on what stage they were working on during the test cycles. The team just said 'sensor issue' to me and they announced the issue after 3 test cycles, reset the seats and then said it will be closed until further notice.

Sounds about right, I used the test seat on Opening day and I got the green light no issues. Went to board, denied. Even the operators were confused as they did a staff changeover and the person on the platform even saw the green light at the entry and had apparently had much larger people than me riding. So that does make sense

[REGIE]

Not sure this is the right topic but I thought I would mention at seaworld a few days ago while lining up for leviathan I was talking to this guy in line and he had been contracted to work on the structure for leviathan! He said while building it they ran into a big problem that the trains ended up being heavier then they predicted and were to harsh on the structure so they had to add metal bracing to help but the extra weight from the steal was to much for the footers so they had to one by one rebuild every footer he said it was an absolute nightmare but the footers were just not capable of the extra load from the steal bracing this impacted the queue line in some places too. He pointed out where they had to completely rebuild some areas it was actually really interesting it was his first time riding it and he loved the ride but I felt sorry for his and everyone else involved it sounded like a nightmare. I thought it was weird they wouldn’t have realised the trains were heavier then the standard ones but he made it seem like Gravity Group supplied the design and trains while another company from Australia actually put the thing together.

[Brad2912]

33 minutes ago, REGIE said:

I felt sorry for his and everyone else involved it sounded like a nightmare

Why feel sorry? He would have been paid for ever hour he was onsite. Delays just meant more $$