These Roller Coasters Will Make You Flip Quiz

Answer: Coney Island

Specifically, Flip Flap Railway ran at the tiny, long-defunct Sea Lion Park, one of several to operate on New York City's Coney Island. Other loopers existed before this, like the "centrifugal railways" that popped up in France and Britain as early as the 1840s. These were about as simple as you could make a roller coaster: just a pulley to hoist the car up a shallow incline, tall enough for gravity to get you around the center loop. In 1865, such a ride was built at the Cirque Napoléon, but was shut down when its very first car derailed.

Flip Flap Railway had more engineering than the centrifugal railways. Built by a man named Lina Beecher in the 1880s, he manufactured several coasters that used a perfectly circular loop. Modern models estimate the ride delivered between 6 and 8 gs of force, well above the threshold to cause blackouts and whiplash. An extraordinary, six-second clip of the loop still exists (if you watch it, remember that old video cameras recorded at about double speed). The ride looks like something built out of Hot Wheels track, not an attraction for humans.

Not surprisingly, the apparent physical danger deterred many visitors. Furthermore, even if people wanted to ride Flip Flap, centrifugal railways, and rides like them, their tight radii of rotation forced them to use short trains with low capacities. It was a fun ride to look at, but most people were content just looking.

Answer: Corkscrew

The modern era of coaster design began on June 14, 1959, the opening of Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds. Designed by a company called Arrow Development (later Arrow Dynamics), it was the first ride to feature a track made of tubular steel, which you'll find on virtually any steel ride built since then. Compared to a girder, tubes of steel can easily be molded left and right or, for our purposes, wrapped around itself. On a track like the one pictured, the trains ride on the two thin rails, with supporting struts running under those rails.

A decade later, Arrow designer Ron Toomer began building prototypes with a corkscrew inversion. Corkscrews are the long flips that resemble a stretched out spring. Flip Flap Railway this was not: Toomer's Corkscrew was a success, and the ride was cloned ten times. Installed at many mid-sized parks, these rides were soon beaten by extreme models, but many seek to preserve their charm. The Berry Farm's original has been relocated to a park in Idaho, where the American Coaster Enthusiasts designated it one of their historic Coaster Landmarks.

Answer: Teardrop-shaped

Roughly speaking, a clothoid curve is the curve of maximum smoothness as you travel through it. The curvature increases in a gradual, linear proportion to how far through the loop you've gone. Ever notice how gently you turn into a long turn on the highway? Road curves, too, follow a clothoid shape.

For roller coasters, this gives modern loops a pronounced teardrop shape: the clothoid lets the train gradually enter the loop, whips around at its highest point, then gingerly guide you out. As coasters have gotten faster, they've been able to maintain more energy going into the curve, and thus the optimal teardrop curve has narrowed even more.

Although Lina Beecher (of the Flip Flap) was starting to catch on to the advantages of ovals with his later design, the true clothoid teardrop was conceived by Werner Stengel. In 1976, while working for the Schwarzkopf company, he designed the first modern loop on the Revolution (now called The New Revolution) - a historic must-ride when you visit Six Flags Magic Mountain in California. (Don't get it confused: Britain's first modern looper, 1979's Irn-Bru Revolution at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, was designed by Arrow, not Schwarzkopf.)

Answer: Olympia Looping

As I mentioned, the clothoid loops on modern rides have gotten more gradual. Many coaster junkies prefer the older, less elongated loops that can be found on some older Scwarzkopfs - hence, Olympia Looping has become a favorite of many enthusiasts. Olympia Looping pulls about 5.2 gs, which is about as extreme as a ride can get without the risk of fainting.

One of the contenders for the most extreme ride in the modern era is another small-scale Schwarzkopf, which operated under the name Quimera at Mexico City's La Feria de Chapultepec. Despite its small stature, it's believed to have exceeded 6 gs at several points. The ride was operated far faster than Schwarzkopf advised, and several safety failures were overlooked. In 2019, the coaster catastrophically derailed, killing two riders. Subsequent legal action led to the park's closure.

Answer: Immelmann

Max Immelmann was a World War I dogfighter who took down fifteen enemy planes. Beyond this, he's credited with inventing many aerobatic techniques. The Immelmann turn (also called a "wingover") is a maneuver in which the plane makes a long, sloping turnaround, rising and then turning around in the other direction. Besides this type of turnaround, he's also the namesake of the Blue Max, a German military award for bravery.

The coaster element works just like the flight maneuver. The prolific manufacturer Bolliger & Mabillard (designers of Kumba and Batman: The Ride in the U.S., and Nemesis and Shambala in Europe) often features Immelmanns on its wing coaster and dive coaster models. Different coaster makers have different design philosophies, and Popsci.com quotes Walter Bolliger stating his: "A good coaster should feel smooth and comfortable."

The wrong answers - Otto Weddigen, Heine von Heimburg, and Felix von Luckner - did fight for the German side, but weren't pilots.

Answer: False

The concept of an inverted, wooden roller coaster is one of those ideas that doesn't seem to die, almost as if designers are saying, "They told us we couldn't, so we did." Restricting our scope to the post-Flip Flap era, wooden inversions have been achieved by the Gravity Group (Hades 360 at Mount Olympus, WI, USA, 2005), Rocky Mountain Construction (Outlaw Run, Silver Dollar City, MO, USA, 2013), and MV Rides (Jungle Trailblazer, Shandong, China, 2015).

A debatable situation is the ride pictured: Son of Beast, an ill-fated wooden monstrosity built by the Roller Coaster Corporation of America (RCCA). Kings Island built it intending to outdo its famous coaster, The Beast, which in 2000 had held the record for longest wooden roller coaster for 21 years. Son of Beast opened dominating the lists of the tallest and fastest wooden rides. Most notably, it also had a vertical loop made entirely out of steel. Should this count as the first modern "wooden" inversion? Depends who you ask.

From the start, the ride was plagued with roughness and accidents due to RCCA's shoddy construction. A fracture in the ride caused the loop to be removed in 2006. Later, a severe head injury to a rider in 2009 led to the closure and demolition of the ride. The B&M ride Banshee replaced it - but we'll get to that one shortly.

Answer: Saxophone

Three Screaming Squirrels were built between 2005 and 2007: one in China, one in Russia, and one in Italy's Gardaland. S&S's original press materials called it a "titled Wild Mouse," and the idea was to provide a sideways version of that whipping sensation along every drop-off. As you can see in the photo, each saxophone wraps completely around the track, hanging you upside-down. You then reach a dive that flips you back rightside-up. Then you do it again! The ride ultimately wasn't popular, and Gardaland removed its Squirrel in 2019.

The ride was the inspiration for a default ride model in "Roller Coaster Tycoon 3," the Inverted Wild Mouse. Apparently, the zig-zag looks like a squirrel speeding down a tree. To me, the saxophones look way more like trombones, but I hope my specifying the answer is a woodwind gave you a clue.

Answer: Pretzel knot

On Moonsault Scramble, the pretzel knot really did look like a giant pretzel, more so than it does on Banshee. With forces exceeding 6.5 gs for several seconds, Moonsault's pretzel knot had probably the highest g-force inversion built in the modern era - possibly stronger than Flip Flap Railway! The ASTM International ride regulations, in place in Japan since 2003, don't even *allow* such forces any longer.

When Moonsault Scramble opened in 1983, the ride was one of the tallest coasters anywhere. It was a shuttle coaster, meaning it does not complete a full circuit, like a gigantic version of Vekoma's Boomerang coasters. And like a Boomerang, one of your two passes through the course is taken backwards!

Moonsault Scramble has even been compared to the "euthanasia coaster", a hypothetical coaster design by Julijonas Urbonas to provide a "humane, elegant, and euphoric solution for those who have chosen to end their lives" (according to the MoMA).

Note that the "pretzel loops" that appear on many B&M flying coasters, like Superman: The Ride, are considered a completely different inversion.

Answer: Heartline roll

The "heartline" in this context means an imaginary line passing through your center of mass (about where your heart is). The track essentially wraps around this point, creating the experience for the rider that their whole body is pivoting around their heart. Instead of a disorienting whip, heartlining gives these elements a sense of "hangtime".

An extreme example of heartlining can be seen on the Ultra Twister models manufactured by TOGO. These rides basically rolled you like a pinball through a straight tunnel, slowly rotating you around your heartline. There are no remaining Ultra Twisters in Europe or North America, but videos of the rides in operation are readily available.

Answer: Steel Curtain

The Pittsburgh Steelers' "Steel Curtain" defensive unit, led by "Mean" Joe Green, won a total of four Super Bowls during the 1970s. And now, Kennywood (about 12 miles south of downtown Pitt) has erected a 220 foot (67 meter) monument that bears their name. (In 2021, some people, myself included, were baffled by the park's decision to repaint its other hypercoaster purple - Ravens colors!)

Believe it or not, this towering ride was built by S&S Worldwide, the same people who built the Screaming Squirrel we saw earlier. Featuring nine inversions, the most memorable is its very first. Immediately off the lift hill, the ride enters the "Drachen Fire dive drop," tossing riders around so they take the first drop upside-down. "Drachen Fire" was a defunct Arrow coaster located at Busch Gardens that pulled a similar trick.

"Bomb Squad" was South African rugby, the "Production Line" from ice hockey's Red Wings, and the "Electric Company" from the NFL's Buffalo Bills.