Ride testing with water dummies has begun on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in Magic Kingdom, meaning we are getting ever closer to that exciting Summer 2024 opening date and we can finally speculate what the throughput and standby wait times might look like when the ride opens.
Water dummies were being used to test the seats in the ride vehicles, which are themed as logs. It is believed that there will be a total of 48 of these log themed ride vehicles when the ride opens.
What’s a water dummy?
A water dummy can be made from either a hard plastic, as is seen here on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, or soft plastic like the one shown below. They are filled with water to simulate the weight and presence of a human on a thrill ride in order to test the safety of a ride’s restraints.
The ride restraints themselves appear to have been updated in preparation for this test and now appear to have an orange foam-like material around the cream metal lap bar.
In a nostalgic twist, using water dummies for testing ride safety was used in Splash Mountain ride testing in 2018 after closure for refurbishment.
The water dummies were seen with markers at 150 suggesting that they have been tested to a weight limit of 150 pound per dummy, with a total of 300-pound weight tested per lap bar restraint.
From this we can speculate that the ride vehicles, which look to have been reimagined rather than replaced, will seat the same number of guests as when the ride was Splash Mountain. This means that the ride should have a capacity of 1,800 people per hour.
Wait times for Splash Mountain often hit an average of over an hour for every year it was open. Wait times for newer rides that do not have a virtual queue such as Avatar: Flight of Passage, in Animal Kingdom which often has a 200 minute plus wait time during peak times could happen here too.
We suspect wait times of up to three hours are to be expected if Disney adopts a stand-by queue line for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The appeal of a new ride, combined with old fans wanting to experience the reimagined ride will likely lead to high interest.
However, in recent years, new rides have been given a virtual queue upon opening to combat the long wait times. When TRON opened on 4th April 2023, in Magic Kingdom the only way to ride was by using the virtual queue system and that remains the same today. Cosmic Rewind: Guardians of the Galaxy, at EPCOT, is also a ride which uses a virtual queue system and has done since it opened on 27 May 2022. We expect Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will use the virtual queue system too when it opens this Summer.
What do you think the wait times will be? Leave your comments below.
Happy riding friends.
