Tac Talks Coasters - Post 193
Photo Sources: All photos are mine
American Eagle at Six Flags Great America!
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Opened: 1981
Manufacturer: Intamin
Height: 127 ft (38.7 m)
Drop: 147 ft (44.8 m)
Speed: 66 mph (106.2 kph)
Length: 4,560 ft (1,417.3 m)
Place in my rankings: #80 (landing between Scorpion at Busch Gardens Tampa and Roar at Six Flags America)
If we're talking classic, iconic rides at Six Flags Great America, you gotta talk about American Eagle. This ride has been an icon of the park for 45 years and it's still going strong! It didn't open with the park like Whizzer did, but coming 5 years into the park's life and it far and away gave them the headliner attraction they deserved. Built towards the tail end of the wooden racing coaster craze of the 70s and early 80s, American Eagle topped all of the others that came before it in terms of scale. It opened as the tallest and fastest roller coaster, of any kind, wood or steel, in the world in 1981 and held those records until 1988. Today, it still holds the records for tallest, fastest, longest, and largest drop on a wooden racing coaster.
Like Whizzer, American Eagle was closed the first time I came to the park in 2024. Since it was still early in the season when I visited then, it was still closed because it was having track work done. Over the last decade or so, from what I'd heard, the park had also been letting American Eagle slip in terms of quality and ride experience. It had been getting more and more rough and hadn't had its two tracks race in nearly a decade. It could run both sides, but when they did, they would either only operate one side and switch them throughout the day, or stagger dispatches so the trains wouldn't race. This is thought to be in order to limit wear and tear on the structure. I'd also heard that the ride was REALLY rough, especially in its enormous 560° helix turnaround, so I was worried about what the ride would be like going into it.
But on this visit, American Eagle was open, but what was even better was that it was racing!! For the park's 50th anniversary this year, American Eagle was running in top condition and the park announced before the season began that the ride would race as it should for the first time in years! So needless to say, I was very excited to hear that :3 I got two rides on American Eagle during my visit, one on the red side and one on the blue side! If I had to pick, I think I liked the blue side slightly more but I thought both were very good for what they were! My first ride on blue side was only a semi-race, in the fact that they did dispatch the red train alongside us, but it didn't have anyone in it lol. My ride on red side was a full race with the blue side full of people as well hehe.
In terms of ride experience, I thought the ride was a lot of fun! What I think American Eagle does best is it's speed and sense of scale. This ride is HUGE!! And like a lot of big wooden coasters, the ride just feels massive when you look at it. It's dense wooden structure painted bright white with the red running rails and blue floorboards completing the all-American look. Going down that drop and flying over the hills on the outward leg really gives a great feeling of speed. And with the refurbishments the ride got prior to the season, I thought it was running fantastically! I found it to be very smooth for a wooden coaster, still having that characteristic rumble that you expect from a woodie, but not nearly the jackhammer fest I was braced for lol. Even in the ride's massive helix, which I'd heard was the worst part of the ride, I didn't notice any roughness really at all! Same goes for the return run and final helix as you hit the final brake run, really a very enjoyable ride all around!
If I had to give one thing I wish American Eagle did better, it would be airtime. None of the hills, or even the first drop for that matter, gave any kind of noticeable negative Gs. There may have been some slight weightlessness feelings on a couple of them, but I do think the other racing woodies like the ones at Kings Island or Kings Dominion did better in that department. So I was a bit underwhelmed with the airtime, but another area that American Eagle surprised me with was laterals. Mainly in that giant helix turnaround, it starts of slow, but you build up a decent amount of speed as you go around it. So by the time you're coming around the last bit of it, you've got some surprisingly strong forces pushing you to the side, which I hadn't expected lol.
A few other minor closing notes: American Eagle has one of the most bizarrely set up entrance paths/queue lines I've ever seen lmao. The ride itself is set way back from the park, on the other side of the park's train line and a service road, so the path to get there winds and zigzags all up and over those before coming back down into the station lol. I also think it's funny how this ride was built by Intamin, who is much more well-known for their crazy steel coasters. Additionally, when they were brought in to build American Eagle, they had only one coaster to their name: the tiny little steel kiddie coaster Wilderness Run at Cedar Point. Talk about swinging for the fences on your second run at building a coaster lmao.
And the last point that I'll bring up is that, as of now at least, American Eagle is my second favorite racing coaster I've done! I put it above all the other out-and-back wooden racing coasters I've done, which are Racer at Kings Island, Racer 75 at Kings Dominion, and Thunder Road at Carowinds. It's also well above Racer at Kennywood haha. I even have American Eagle ranked a few spots ahead of Gemini at Cedar Point! The only racing coaster that tops this one for me is Lightning Racer at Hersheypark, just because that layout is so much more dynamic. But kudos to Great America for keeping this classic coaster running and running so well at that for the park's 50th season! Hopefully the Eagle stays racing for many years to come!
Thanks for checking out today's coaster post! Keep an eye out for tomorrow's coaster!
