Growing up, my home park was Magic Springs in Arkansas. My very first "upside down" coaster was Gauntlet, their Vekoma SLC. Child me thought it was awesome, riding it again and again every year I retu...
Growing up, my home park was Magic Springs in Arkansas. My very first "upside down" coaster was Gauntlet, their Vekoma SLC. Child me thought it was awesome, riding it again and again every year I returned to the park for vacation, either building up some kind of immunity to how rough it was or straight-up not caring.
Flash forward ~5 years when I became a full-fledged enthusiast. I heard that SLC's were practically the worst model ever built. I kept thinking back to my childhood, remembering how rough Gauntlet was, and thought "yeah, I can see that". I visited Canada's Wonderland about a year later. I had heard tales of Flight Deck and how horrible it was. And my dumb brain told me "You grew up riding one of these. How bad can it be?"
Oh how wrong I was.
Never before and never since have I been jackhammered like that before on a coaster. My head became a pinball bouncing between the sides of the over-the-shoulder restraint. The whole train felt like it was bouncing (and I was in the front half). If all the wheels were removed and replaced with square ones, I can guarentee that it wouldn't make a difference. I was in pain from the second we dropped off the lift to the second it ended. It felt like my brain was leaking out of my ears. Someone puked on the brake run off of the train in front of me (they were stacked, because of course they were).
I was changed that day. I learned that while all SLC's suck, some suck way, WAY worse. Flight Deck very potentially being the all-time worst. I don't know why I just typed all that for strangers on the internet. Consider it a warning to all who are debating getting on this coaster. Its equally terrible counterpart across the midway's demise has finally come. I'm going to pop champagne the day Flight Deck finally follows it out of this park.
