On February 24, Dollywood gave members of the media a behind-the-scenes construction tour, giving them an up-close look at the progress of NightFlight Expedition, the park’s most ambitious attraction to date. Here's all the new information we've learned from the tour and our predictions for what it will be like.
Spoiler alert: If you want to go into this journey completely blind, please do not read on. While our predictions are just our best guesses based on photos and videos from our trip and could be wrong, they could also ruin the element of surprise on your trip if we're right.
The 44,000-square-foot building is almost completely enclosed except for the building's “front door,” where they can still bring in large equipment.
Dollywood has shared some new concept art. The first is an entrance arch located somewhere near Big Bear Mountain that will help indicate where visitors are heading to the new ride.
Here's new concept art for the building's queue entrance (via theme park vision):
This is what the hanger entrance currently looks like, thanks The adventure is there:
Although there will be an outdoor queuing area, most of the waiting time is spent indoors on the first floor in several differently themed rooms (Thanks Tampa Jay):
The queue is designed to accommodate a long wait of 55 minutes.
NightFlight Expedition has a passenger capacity of 1,200 passengers per hour. Each boat can accommodate 10 passengers, which means it needs to be dispatched every 30 seconds to reach that capacity. For maximum efficiency, the station consists of a loading area, an unloading area and a separate ADA station with sliding rails, so a ship can spend more time loading or unloading without interrupting dispatch intervals.
Unfortunately, the media did not see any other parts of the ride. From the station, you can see that sections of the rapids appear to be (at least partially) closed. When you reach the highest point, you have no idea how high you are from the bottom.
because Johnny Entertainmentwe get a glimpse of the beginning of the journey as the ship pulls out of the station.
How do I think NightFlight Expedition works?
Dollywood president Eugene Naughton talked about the mysterious “flying” part of the ride: “We actually have a room that you go into on a night flight and it's actually three different rooms. It's a media-driven experience. I think the best way I can describe it and what I'm going to share today is, it's like having VR without the VR glasses. It’s the same experience. So, it’s going to be really fun for people. “It feels like you’re actually in the media. “
There is ride component hardware on the ground outside the ride that appears to be the locomotion basis for the simulated flight. I counted six large support arms as shown below, so if there are two of each motion base, there are three motion bases in total. At first I didn’t understand why the motion base had wheels on the bottom…
For a nerd like me, the funniest part of the trip was when Eugene revealed that they were going to have “the largest attraction carousel in the world.” Now, “maximum” and “turntable” may have different definitions, but either way, this is exciting new information!
Now, we know there is a small, separate carousel track section somewhere on the ride. I think this is used to rotate the ships 180 degrees so they can get back onto the big turntable, have them face the screen, and then move on after the media video ends.
Small turntable.
I think the area circled below may be the center of the large turntable:
It's hard to tell if the parts and spacing are the same due to the different scale of the pictures, but I think the large turntable will be divided into three parts and come with three movement bases, each of which will be in its own “room”. Eugene talked about soundproofing the walls so that sound doesn't penetrate into the other two rooms.
Are the holes aligned? Is the motion base attached to the turntable?
Motion bases have wheels on the bottom because they move! I think they are part of the turntable. Top view:
To get a visual idea of how the motion base works, I created a (not to scale) model using K'nex (the 20+ year old motor still works!).
Guessing the layout of the night flight adventure
Here are the latest predictions for NightFlight Expedition’s layout:
lingering questions
If you needed to do some maintenance, where would you store the 500,000 gallons of water?
Where are the vehicle storage and maintenance areas?
When does Night Flight Adventure open? Dollywood is still talking about a spring opening. They work seven days a week, two shifts a day. Still, it looks like a complicated process, so I think a June opening is the most likely.
We are excited to build a ride of this size and complexity in a park outside of Disney and Universal Studios! What element of NightFlight Expedition are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below.
PS: If you plan to use our content and ideas in your TikTok videos, please at least give us credit.
