When you visit a Disney theme park, you’re there to ride all the wonderful E Ticket attractions. The last thing that you want is for a ride to tear up while you’re waiting in line or, even worse, when you’re on it. Sadly, this sort of thing does happen. Every moving part has a failure rate, and these attractions are built with more moving parts than you can count.
Disney is studious about guest safety, and a 101 code signifies that an attraction isn’t operating safely. When that happens, Disney’s failsafe system executes, and you wind up stuck on a broken ride. There’s nothing you can do about it, but you can at least arm yourself with the knowledge about which rides are the most susceptible to 101 codes. Here are the seven Disney attractions that are most likely to break down. Note that this list is in no particular order, but I will state which ones are more susceptible to 101 codes.
California Screamin’
Image: DisneyYou’ll notice a recurring theme on this list. Roller coasters cause a lot of problems for The Walt Disney Company. The idea of a safety-first business offering several dynamic roller coasters is kind of a mixed message, after all. That’s especially true of outdoors roller coasters, which explains why Disney only has a handful of them.
As the only true adrenaline junkie ride at Disneyland Resort, California Screamin’ needs a lot of upkeep and behind-the-scenes maintenance. Even with this near-constant level of caretaking, it has frequent downtime. It’s also had more than a few storied incidents where guests were trapped onboard. Disney cast members had to climb up to the top and walk these park visitors down from the ride.
California Screamin’ is just a tough ride all around. The Los Angeles Times determined that it was one of the top three attractions in Southern California in terms of injury reports. Maybe we should take the ride’s name more literally.
Expedition Everest
Image: DisneyThis Animal Kingdom attraction shares a lot of commonality with California Scream’. They’re both high-velocity roller coasters, with the Disney California Adventure version going 55 miles per hour as opposed to 50 miles per hour for Expedition Everest, part of which is going backward. Disney tries to take weather out of the equation more with Expedition Everest by having most of the action take place indoors. Still, a rain cloud all but guarantees that the Disco Yeti goes on break for a while. The Yeti itself has been torn up for a long time, but that’s not a deal-breaker on Expedition Everest. The primary concerns are keeping the coaster tracks in good shape and the coaster cart’s brakes functioning properly.
Frozen Ever After
Image: DisneyThe presence of this one on the list isn’t a surprise to anyone who has visited Epcot over the last couple of years. Frozen Ever After uses state-of-the-art audio-animatronics (AAs) for all the major characters from Frozen the movie. These animatronics tend to get – I wish there were a better word for this – frozen. They stop moving in a way that’s almost thematic, and the ride turns to 101 whenever this happens. During the first year of Frozen Ever After, it was down so often that it developed a terrible reputation for constant downtime. The ride’s been better since then, but it still goes down a ton, which is problematic for an attraction with low throughput.
The Haunted Mansion (and other Omnimovers)
Image: Disney As I’ve previously discussed, The Haunted Mansion wasn’t the first Omnimover that Imagineers built – that honor goes to Adventure Thru Inner Space – but it is the oldest one still in operation. And the problem with Omnimovers is simple. The giant apparatus tethers all the ride carts together. When any part of the ride cart tears up, everything does.
For this reason, riders often hear the sad announcement from the Ghost Host that the Doombuggy will stop for a while. Sometimes, this happens because of an important reason like helping someone exit the ride. In other instances, it’s because of a serious technical issue that can take the ride down for hours. All Omnimovers are susceptible to downtime of this length due to their interconnected construction. The way that you know Imagineers are amazing at their jobs is that it doesn’t happen more often. You can imagine the difficulty in keeping contraptions this large functioning at optimal capacity.
Indiana Jones Adventure (and Dinosaur)
Image: DisneyAs I mentioned in the Behind the Ride for Indiana Jones Adventure, Disney had to create and build a special Enhanced Motion Vehicle (EMV) for this attraction. And here’s the thing about manufacturing. The prototype for something is the hardest piece of equipment to make operational. Once something is working and available for public consumption, it becomes easier to maintain. When a vehicle is built in high volume, lots of people look at the various parts and find ways to improve or possibly even perfect each one.
The EMVs at Indiana Jones Adventure haven’t had this advantage. Instead, they only exist at Disney theme parks, specifically Disneyland, Tokyo DisneySea and Animal Kingdom. Due to their scarcity and the novel nature of the vehicles, they are EXTREMELY difficult to maintain. When these EMVs malfunction, they have a tendency to take the entire ride area down with them. It’s not like the EMVs can pass each other on the road or anything. And that’s why the brilliant creation that is the EMV is also the reason why Indiana Jones Adventure goes down so much. Since Dinosaur uses the same vehicles, it faces the same challenges and has similar uptime issues.
Space Mountain
Image: DisneyDisney began what has since become an industry standard with Space Mountain. They built the first computerized roller coaster, an idea so profound that it wasn’t even technically possible when Imagineers came up with it. Disney had to wait a decade to finish what they started, and that futuristic design remains in place more than 40 years later. There’s just one problem with it.
Space Mountain’s coaster carts exit the station based on precise timing. They computerized system knows where each vehicle is on the track, and it can signal when a coaster cart is clear to depart. What happens when the computer signals aren’t working correct, though? You guessed it. The sensor malfunctions are the cause of the frequent shutdowns. The attraction simply cannot work when the timing is off. It would be too dangerous.
Test Track
Image: DisneyDisney cast members must feel like Test Track is cursed. The first version of the ride was notoriously inconsistent in its reliability. Then, Disney built a newer, cooler, better version of Test Track…and it tears up a lot, too. To wit, when we were at Epcot last September, the attraction was down for at least an hour for three out of four days. And if you ever discuss ride breakdowns with other theme park tourists, most of them will have a Test Track story. Perhaps the only other ride that’s historically had so many downtime issues is Splash Mountain, an attraction that Disney’s done a much better job of keeping operational in recent years.
Why does Test Track tear up so much? In a way, it’s the deluxe version of Space Mountain. The ride system is largely computerized. There’s a master ride controller plus sensors throughout the attraction…and that’s a lot since Test Track takes place indoors and outdoors, with several well-themed, distinct sections.
Image: DisneyTest Track takes the premise of a computer system and extends it to the logical extreme. Each Test Track vehicle has a computer guidance system…and they communicate with one another. Imagineers take no chances on the fastest ride at Walt Disney World. They need to know that the lanes are clear, and the sensors achieve this task. If literally anything registers wrong, everything else in the system knows and adapts.
In those situations where the system notes a serious error, it shuts down everything. In some instances, resetting the system is easy. In others, a Test Track vehicle stops in the middle of the track, blocking the path for everything else. That’s when the entire ride goes down as cast members work to move that vehicle out of the way.
Toward the end of the attraction, you’ll sometimes see an open door that has the broken and replacement vehicles inside. This is actually a huge no-no since it breaks the illusion, but it still happens once a while. If you can ever sneak a look, you’ll notice a TON of extra coaster carts and several broken ones. Test Track’s operation really takes a toll on its ride vehicles.
