Amusement Ride Safety: Ride Operators

MYTH:  Ride personnel are not well-trained.

REALITY:

• Parks and attractions have their own formalized training procedures, and only after employees earn the required authorization through this training process are they then permitted to staff a ride.
• Employees are trained using procedures established by the facility working together with manufacturers and insurers, and in accordance with relevant public laws and ASTM International standards.
• Patrons expect that a facility will be safe and its staff well-trained, but most do not realize the lengths to which parks and attractions go in meeting and surpassing such expectations.
• Crucial to these training efforts is the industry’s widespread use of formalized operational practices and programs.
• These processes are constantly documented, standardized, practiced, and upgraded.
• This deliberate and sequential manner extends to staff development, as personnel are instructed as admission or loading attendants before training to be operators, and operators of simple rides are brought along step-by-step before graduating to more complex rides.

MYTH:  Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are too young to safely operate amusement park rides, and should be federally-prohibited from doing so.

REALITY:

• There is no data we’re aware of linking younger ride personnel to a higher rate of ride incidents for either guests or staff.
• What’s at issue here is training and experience – not age or any other arbitrary criteria.  Parks and attractions have formalized and validated training procedures, and only after employees earn the required authorization through this training process are they then permitted to staff a ride.
• Moreover, such a federal ban is unlikely to measurably improve our excellent safety record for patrons and personnel, since ride staff are already complemented by numerous other safety practices and since only a small percentage of those mishaps that do occur are caused by either staff or mechanical error.
• Numerous states have such a law on the books – 29 have set a minimum age for ride personnel, and three more have established other employee requirements for these staff.
• At 16, young adults are eligible to drive in most states, as well as lifeguard and hunt – compelling evidence that 16 is an equally appropriate age for working as ride staff.  Some of these activities involve state administration, but, again, that’s where the decisions should be made – at the state level.
• In addition, by federally limiting ride personnel to 18 and older, this equates such work with manufacturing explosives, coal mining, sawmilling, handling radioactive substances, and demolition operations.  There’s a big difference between staffing a ride and those activities.
• Frankly, many of the tasks that ride operators are required to complete are relatively simple and easy to perform.

Visit Amusement Ride Safety Ride Operator Training for an overview of training programs.