Repeated test failures with sandbags a'flyin. And every week, passengers reported to staff: we went airborne for awhile! They.Did.Nothing.
Now anyone who ever made a paper airplane knows: you put weight in the front, to lower the nose. Not the back.
It's called the coefficient of drag.
They smoothed out the 2nd hill. To lower the nose of the raft. But they didn't change the weight minimums, or how the human cargo was loaded on the Verrucht raft carrying little Caleb Schwab to his death and two sisters from Smith Center to the hospital, one with a broken jaw.
Note: I never took physics in high school, but if I can figure this out, they should have, as well.
I have been on my share of airplanes. Loading the "luggage"--human as well as Samsonite-- keeps the plane from crashing. Just last December, I had to check my carry-on bag. I was on a smaller jet. American Airlines calculated knowing that after Christmas, our passenger carry-on bags were WAY overloaded with gifts. So they forced us to check them. Stowed them below us for ballast and balance.
The Schlitterbahn engineers of Verrucht knew enough about load distribution to experiment with seat placement. Here's the first design with the back seat way to the back wall:
And then they moved it forward:
But on the fateful day, what did the staff do?
Did they put the lightest passenger (maybe 70 pounds?) in the front seat, leaving two heavier ladies to add the required total of 400 pounds in the back????
I'd like to see the training manual for the staff at the top of the slide. Do you let people decide where to sit?
This disaster is a repeat of the Hyatt hotel collapse. Inevitable.
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