036 REPORT
TEST AND ADJUST WANTED: Engineers to work 18 hour shifts seven days a week for three months. Sleeping accommodations (dark, oil-soaked pit) provided. All the theme park hamburgers you can eat. Please be sure to fill out your time sheet for 40 hours; we don’t pay overtime. Test and adjust. Those two little words make it sound so easy. See if it works, if not turn the knob. But there are tens of thousands of interrelated knobs any one of which has the potential to bring your attraction to its knees. And of course all that knob fiddling is done by exhausted individuals in an impossibly compressed time span.
So if it takes so long, why not schedule an appropriate amount of time to test and adjust from the start? We did. The problem is that there are two certainties in any theme park project schedule: One is that the schedule will slip. The other is that opening day won’t change. Since test and adjust is the last activity before opening day... well, you get the idea. I’ve worked on projects where the scheduled time for test and adjust became nega- tive! See if Einstein can figure that one out. Test and adjust at its best is an exhilarating time. It’s a time to get speeds just right. A time to test the reliability of sensors and maybe move them an inch or two. A time to make sure that water doesn’t overflow boat troughs and turn down the pumps if it does. A time to laugh when you discover the electrical conduits have been filled with water by those overflowing troughs But what if the whole approach doesn’t work? What if that system of a dozen high- pressure valves can’t raise that lift in ten seconds no matter how you actuate them? Then test and adjust turns into ‘insanely chaotic field redesign and punt’. Anyway, that’s how we spent the last few months in American Adventure: changing valves, changing wiring, reprogramming stage computers, and always trying to keep things from running into each other or tearing each other apart. One day we actuated the valves on Thomas Jefferson’s and Ben Franklin’s lift in the wrong order and managed to put 30 degree bend into a steel I-beam the size of your leg. Ten minutes later the welders were cutting the piece out and replacing it. Time waits for no theme park opening.
OPENING The first American Adventure show was presented to the public on an employee preview night, four days before opening. Most of the Epcot team had heard rumors
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Steve Alcorn
that it might run - go 102 in Disney parlance. When we finally put out the radio call ‘American Adventure 102’ hundreds of people had already gathered in the preshow area outside the theater doors. Many of the executives were there. Of course, just as there’s a 102, there is also the dreaded 101: the attraction going down in ignominious flames, so to speak. My fingers were crossed. At least half the audience knew how complex a show it was—by far the most complex Disney had ever attempted. They also knew that it had never run success- fully. A lift had always failed to appear, or the carriage stopped short of its marks. Down in the pit I could almost feel their good will, as if the lifts were being willed up by psychic energy.
One by one the lifts rose, and the carriage indexed. Near the end, when Walt Disney’s face appeared on the screen, the theater filled with spontaneous applause. When the show was over there was a standing ovation.
Theme Park Design: Behind the Scenes with an Engineer - by Steve Alcorn is available from
www.amazon.com
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