Anyone notice rides having technical difficulties?

[firstmickey]

We went Jan 30-Feb 3 and noticed a lot of glitches on rides.
On Ellen's Universe of Energy the last 2 minutes of the ride were cut off (with the final jeopardy answer not revealed) and we had to wait for maintenance to come and manually override the doors to get out.

On HM we stalled in the room with the head in the crystal ball for a long time before we kept moving.

On Buzz Lightyear, we got stuck in the last room for about 2 minutes but the lasers still worked so we racked up a lot of points. We both made Space Ace!!

Also, when we were in line for Splash Mtn, they said it was down and they didn't know how long it would be, so we left. We rode it later when it was almost dark. No line because it was COLD!

DH and I kept joking that we hoped ToT didn't break down when we were on it.

Does this happen often? We never experience this at all in Sept.

 

[disneyfantotheend]

The only problem we ever had was with Splash Mountain. We were stuck in it for over half hour our last trip which was several years ago. They kept announcing please remnain seated the ride will soon start again. Well it finally did continue, but when we got to the area where you board and unboard, they weren't letting anyone on, so I guess it was still not working. Luckily, my 3 year old at the time was not big enough to go on. I had a hard enough time keeping my five year old still while we waited.

 

[SnackyStacky]

The Omnimover rides (Haunted Mansion, Buzz Lightyear....the kinds of rides where cars just continually pass through the ride without a gap...) have to stop if someone handicapped needs extra time to load in.

I was on Splash at one point when there was no sound, and no animation. It was incredible creepy. That week, it had all kinds of problems. We kept hearing the "trouble upstream message" over and over. At one point, we got stuck next to the waterfall after the huge drop.

 

[tjkraz]

Add Spaceship Earth to the list of rides that must stop for the handicapped. I think the ride stopped three separate times during one trip. Try sitting on that one, stopped, during the "return trip to Earth" portion at the end.

As SnackyStacky said, I'm sure that was the reason for your stoppages on Buzz Lightyear and HM. During our recent 6-day visit, the only shutdowns that impacted us were Rock N Rollercoaster and Splash Mtn. Both were up and running before the end of the day. Guess that's to be expected with theme parks that are open 365 days / year.

 

[CamColt]

8/95, we were in TOT when the power went out. We were in the Library part so we got to hang out there for a while.

8/02 we got stuck on Splash MT. We heard that "How do ya do?" song over and over and over! But it was better than being stuck outside with the hot sun beaming down on us. My mother and DSs werent on the ride and they didnt know what happened to us.

 

[honeymo78]

In 95 I was stuck on Splash Mountain - when you go outside (not after the drop) and I got to watch the Spectromagic parade while we waited. It wasn't too bad b/c the view of the parade was great.

 

[vicb]

We had a CM confirm that several rides stop to load and unload handicap guests. So when we got stopped in HM with DS who was pretty scared anyway, we were able to explain that the ride was fine, just stopped to help a wheelchair guest and that helped him overcome fear. Now when he got stopped on Buzz, he was thrilled!

 

[TLinden16]

We got stuck on Splash Mountain several times in December (once for 30 minutes when we were drenched to the bone because of severe rain, and with a blower blowing on us near the end of the ride--not fun).

Karen

 

[SueM in MN]

Any of the rides that have a moving walkway (except for Peter Pan) can be slowed down or stopped for someone with a disability to get on or off. Peter Pan can't be stopped except in an actual emergency. A few of those rides (Buzz Lightyear is one) have a wheelchair car where the ride needs to be momentarily stopped to load/unload a wheelchair. (but, boy some of those CMs are very effecient at loading).
They do try to group people with disbilities together so they can laod a bunch of people at one stop and minimize the number of times they stop a ride. In addition, we have sometimes had to wait thru several ride cycles to board because the CM said they had stopped as many times as allowed in that time period.

 

[firstmickey]

Thanks for the info.
We didn't even think of that.
Donna

 

[doriemg]

We were there too from 1/25/03 through 2/1/03. We got stopped 2 times on Spaceship Earth but figured it was because of loading a handicapped person. Has anyone ever noticed that the audioanimatronics get a little spooky when you're stuck in front of them for any length of time? I kept expecting them to suddenly look over at me We also got stopped once for Haunted Mansion and that was kinda spooky too.

As far as real technical difficulties go, yes I did notice a lot more problems than normal. The first problems occurred on the Haunted Mansion. In the Stretching Room the light bulb that illuminates the hanging figure was out so for anyone riding the ride the first time it made no sense when he said "Of course there's always my way." Then the head in the crystal ball wasn't working. On Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the displays was dark. Space Mountain was out of commission one day for a couple of hours. I also noticed they had a real problem unloading the boat rides. We rode It's a Small World twice and both times the boats were backed up really far. DH reported that same problem on Splash Mountain and we encountered it on El Rio Del Tiempo too.

By far, the worst problem while we were there was with the monorail. The last 3 days of our trip the monorail was having major problems and took forever. The first problem I noticed was with a car I was riding in. The door wouldn't close properly and it kept reopening and playing the message about "please stand clear of the doors". At each station a CM would finally have to walk up and push the door shut. Then one of the days we were told that the Pink monorail had a "door open" error even though there was no door open and it had to run the whole day on override which meant it couldn't go any faster than 2 miles per hour. It got stuck at the TTC for about 15 minutes before they could get it moving again. We asked a CM why they didn't take it out of service and he told us that they had nothing to replace it with. On the last day they must have taken it out of service because it appeared that only one resort monorail was running. Wait times were lengthy and when it did get there it was packed to overflowing. Not sure what the problem is. We just attributed everything to it being the slow season. We still had a great vacation and wouldn't hesitate to go to Disney again.