By Thorne
A little over a month ago, FunSpot Atlanta closed, taking with it AireForce One, an acclaimed, world-class roller coaster. The park was failing when the coaster was built, with the it serving as a Hail Mary attempt to bring more attendance. Ultimately, it was not enough, and the park was forced to close after the coaster only operated for three years. But today, we got good news: Six Flags is buying the ride and is promising to reopen it by the 2029 season, hopefully 2028. But we are left with the mystery of where exactly its new home will be!
Shipping a coaster isn’t cheap, and Aire is quite the beast, so it would make sense to prioritize closer parks. The closest Six Flags-owned park is Six Flags Over Georgia, about thirty minutes away. Much as I would love this, as it is my home park and the place where I first fell in love with roller coasters, there are strategic reasons why this might not make sense.
AireForce One was designed by Rocky Mountain Construction, a company which has a lot of pull with coaster enthusiasts. Enthusiasts are often the theme park equivalent of whales, bringing in a lot of revenue to parks — the very angle FunSpot bet on and lost. RMCs have a reputation of having some of the smoothest — but also some of the most intense! — rides in the industry.
Though AireForce One was a ground-up new coaster, they specialize in converting older wooden roller coasters to use their steel “I-Box” track while adding all sorts of intense inversions and rolls, taking. Six Flags Over Georgia did this to Cyclone, one of their old wooden roller coasters, in 2018, turning it into Twisted Cyclone. While not on the same level of intensity as Aire, it would fill less of a void in the lineup at Six Flags.
The next closest park under the Six Flags umbrella (ignoring water parks like Whitewater) is Carowinds, four hours away in Charlotte. Carowinds has a wooden coaster that is ripe for this sort of RMC conversion, Hurler, right next to the big enthusiast bait ride they already have, Fury 325, a coaster that focuses on extreme speed over inversions with the tallest lift hill in the world.
However, that is Carowinds’ only adult-sized wooden coaster left — Woodstock Express in Camp Snoopy does not count! — after the closure of Thunder Road, which might dissuade them. There are people who have a certain nostalgia for wooden coasters, as rattle-y as they get as they age without extensive maintenance and upkeep that is typically only worth it for particularly historic and iconic rides.
Furthermore, Carowinds is currently constructing the highest drop log flume ride in the world, which is undoubtedly a significantly capital expenditure. While the relocation of AireForce One will be a significant investment in and of itself, it will be a more affordable way for the park to acquire a high-quality RMC compared to doing a new conversion. In particular, the I-Box tracks are large, precision-molded pieces of steel that are quite pricey to forge, and relocating Aire skips that step.
Six Flags did confirm the ride will continue to be known as AireForce One, named after the founder of FunSpot, a significant figure in the industry. Despite the failure of the Atlanta park, FunSpot has had success with similar, smaller theme parks in Florida. However, more importantly, in the context of Carowinds, Aire's theming is aerospace, which fits in with the “Aeronautica” theme in the back part of the park, a tribute to the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kiddy Hawk — a name bestowed to a janky inverted kiddie coaster that once used to be a Reptar-themed Rugrats ride.
AireForce One could be slotted in on either side of Afterburn, another larger — and smoother — inverted coaster that used to be themed after Top Gun before the intellectual property licenses expired. The west side would provide more visibility from the entrance, though the east side would put it next to Copperhead Strike, another fantastic coaster, in the Blue Ridge Junction section. There are other spaces in the park that might work, even potentially next to Fury 325, though the opportunity for such cohesive theming in Aeronautica seems like such a no brainer.
Regardless of placement, adopting Aire would ensure that Carowinds has the ultimate combination of pull for enthusiasts, the B&M gigacoaster Fury 325 with a Rocky Mountain Construction I-Box. This would help elevate Carowinds further as more of a destination park rather than simply regional amusement park — a park truly worthy of long trips from around the world. Wherever it winds up, though, it will be magical to see AireForce One fly once more, as it is a masterpiece that deserved to live on beyond a few short years of service.