Life for Susan Bonds is one spine-tingling, breathtaking, cliff-hang-ing thrill after another. When she's not traversing a shaky suspension bridge over a molten lava pit or dodging enormous rolling boulders, she’s confronting rats, scorpions and ill-tempered snakes.
But, hey, it’s all in a day’s work.
Bonds, a 1984 industrial engineering graduate of Georgia Tech, is the show producer for Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) responsible for the Indiana Jones Adventure thrill ride that opened this spring at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.
The adventure introduces a new generation of theme-park technology that Michael Eisner, chairman and chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Co., boasts is “our biggest new ride in 40 years."
“It's a wild, kind of out-of-control experience," agrees Bonds. “It’s definitely an innovative technology."
In addition to creating the Indiana Jones Adventure, WDI – the creative development, design and engineering subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co. – developed and patented the rides Enhanced Motion Vehicles, each of which has an on-hoard ride-control computer. Each ride-control computer contains multiple programmed versions of the adventure, with nearly 160,000 different combinations.
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