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Disney Launches Fireworks With Compressed Air
rtphokie writes "When Disney debuted its new firework show at Disneyland recently, they also debuted some new technology which uses compressed air to lift fireworks. This virtually eliminates the need for smoke-producing black powder and other materials at launch, significantly reducing ground-level smoke, and apparently: 'Disney is in the process of donating all seven patents associated with the new air launch technology to a non-profit organization so these patents can be licensed to other pyrotechnic providers'. Something to think about for those of us attending fireworks shows this weekend in the U.S."
Part of the whole fireworks experience for me, and I'm sure for others, is the bombarding of the senses: sight, sound, and even smell.
Fireworks with no gunpowder smell? With no black snow falling? I have so many memories of watching the fireworks over the lake in Epcot, the clouds of smoke only visible when the fireworks explode and light up the sky.
Sounds like something I could just watch on my computer or TV, if I wanted. I'll pass. It was bad enough that they had to take away Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, now they're robbing of me of smoke filled fireworks.
I wonder what happens if the firework explodes before the air tank is empty? Burning hot shards headed 200mph in all directions?
...how long it will be before you'll be able to buy one of those compressed air launchers at rest stops in South Carolina along route 95.
I belive the quote is, "Well I don't want Fop, godammit! I'm a Dapper Dan man!"
-Peter
I read somewhere that the chemicals used to launch fireworks can contain toxic materials like lead...so thank you disney for generating a better technology!
Is this really new technology? One can make cheap solenoid based air cannons that can do this quite easily, the plans are available openly for anyone willing to spend the time to google. I imagine what they use is very similar to the t-shirt launchers and whatnot at basketball games.
ps: is the Polaris Missle considered a "firework"?
The cloud that's created from launch turns into the color of the current firework going off. It just adds to the experience. So does the smell of the gunpowder. I guess that's why laser shows bore me.
I also hate the crowds at firework shows. That's another rant.
I work at Disneyland, and this is something that has been talked about quite a bit at work. I do crowd control for Fantasmic!, which also works during the fireworks to set up standing areas and keep walkways clear. The two reasons for using compressed air was, like the article said, to reduce smoke at launch, and to reduce the noise of them being launched. The former was achieved, but the latter seems to have turned for the worse. The fireworks do make quite a noise when they launch, but they seem to make an even louder 'boom' while bursting in the air. The residents in the surrounding neighborhoods have been complaining for years about the noise these fireworks produce, and the new series 'Disney's Imagine - A Fantasy In The Sky' was supposed to calm the burning tempers. It seems to have failed. Complaining about the fireworks at Disneyland is like complaining about living next to a railroad track. They were there when you moved in, so you must have known what you were getting yourself into. Oh, and by the way, the new firework show is quite lame. The music played has nothing to do with the fireworks that are going off, nor does it seem to 'fit in.' Okay, so maybe the music from the Lion King (The Circle Of Life) fits in, as they do launch circular fireworks, but who wants to see a hallow circle? Save your time and stress from the crowd by going to a traditional park on the 4th. It will be much more fun, I promise.
One year when I was a kid, we got front row seating at a fireworks show where the launching was done from an island in a small lake. (The lake shore defined what was the "front row".) We were close enough to see the people on the ground, and the glow from the fuse as the firworks went up in the air.
It rained on the day of the 4th, and apparently some of the powder in the launch tubes got wet. Quite a few of the fireworks went off at lower altitudes than intended. One particular launch went up about ten feet, came back down, lit on the ground of the launch site, paused a moment (during which the launch crew scattered), then went off on the ground. A couple seconds later, several more tubes launched. I don't know if the crew launched them, or the "extreme-low-altitude" firework did.
Obviously, launching with compressed air is immune to this problem...
Our local company, Bartolotta's, and a number of other companies have already greatly increased the safety factor by using control panels to light off most of the fireworks. This means that for most of the fireworks, there are no people anywhere close to them during the actual show.
:)
As an aside, the Bartolotta's do the Big Bang in Milwaukee each year, at the start of Summerfest. This year there were an average of 6000 fireworks set off each minute for well over 20 minutes. It's impressive. I grew up about 3 miles from the Bartolotta grounds, where they would occasionally test fireworks. Pretty neat seeing fireworks in the middle of the winter.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I was actually at Disney World (Orlando FL) about 3 days ago and saw their massive daily fireworks display at night. They fired off quite possibly thousands of dollars worth of fireworks using the traditional black powder. The amount of smoke in the sky grew as the fireworks went off and by the end of the show there was a massive cloud of smoke -- looked like man-made clouds.
Anyway, while some might say the smoke is unnecessary I think it added to the overall effectiveness of the show. The smoke created a great backdrop for the fireworks that literally made the sky light up with colors. Quite spectacular.
I think the note about it being years in development was correct. My boss from about 6 years ago worked on the imagineering team that was developing this technology. His portion was the miniature electronics on the projectiles that controlled the timing of the detonations.
He had some wooden balls that were used as test projectiles for the launching mechanism, and would amuse us with stories of how they'd have to seek cover for when the balls would return. A lot of his effort went into making sure that the communication between the launch tube and the projectiles was correct (apparently, the chip inside the projectile had to be told to stop listening for a few milliseconds during launch or it would see some false signals)
e to the i pi equals negative one
I wish we had more holidays like Earth Day- where people are encouraged to participate. Modern life in the US has sort of lost the old idea of holidays- where you'd interact with a community, at the very least building relationships.
How helpful are the UN's "Special Days"?
Disneyland builds/built a lot of their computer control equipment in house. My dad made a lot of it, including "Mickey's Match" - the original computer-based fireworks launch system that was programmable.
Before that, a man named Mickey (i'm not making this up, the guy's name was Mickey) physcially ran around and attempted (pretty well, from what i hear) and manually lit the fireworks to coincide with the music. Eventually, he started using electrically fired squibs. My dad's system allowed folks to pre-program sequences to launch with electrically fired squibs that would be in time with the music.
Since you didn't run to Fry's in the mid 80's to pick up a Pentium III to run Star Tours ride control (actually, Star Tours runs on a 486 for its ride control, with one redundant computer for each simulator), a ton of the hardware for ride control, gate counters, etc. have all be built by hand by the Disneyland Sound department and WED.
Many of the rides at Disneyland have my dad's name on the circuit boards in them.
Just about every system, even to this day - are Z80 based. Its simple, its cheap, and they are bulletproof.
Some of the Disneyland items he's made...
- Invented/installed the fireflys in Pirates of the Carribean
- Came up with putting the green-eyed rats at the end of Pirates as you go up back to ground level. We have a bunch of them at home and put them in windows and under the Christmas tree
- Invented the light flicker-ers that have been used at Dland for almost 30 years to make plain lightbulbs in opaque houseings look like they are flame
- Real-time population counter for Disneyland. Even went to the president's office and installed the LED display on his desk (prior to the popularization of "computer networks")
- Completed the transition of all of Disneyland's audio and attraction control tapes to solid-state ROMs for playback. They used to have rooms FULL of huge tape bins with 1" wide magtapes that would spool into a big 1" x 40" x 20" bins and be one big long lopp track - literally. This took a long time becuase back in the early 90's when they did it, they needed to send out the tapes to special subcontractors that could digitize it.
Its neet to see Disneyland, and how its starting to come back a bit after the 90's trashing by Eisner (ptooey!) now that he's been emasculated a bit. Things are getting better, and he's still making all kinds of neat stuff.
I need to get to Disneyland more often now.. i haven' been in years.. and i used to go 3 times a month when i was a kid.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
"FWOOMP!" isn't a bad sound. Gernade lauchers make a FWOOMP sound when fired.
Leave it to Disney to severely edit yet another Asian product...
Are you refering to Mulan? If so, Disney didn't edit it, they pretty much wrote a new work *loosely* based on the original poem (which I've read in what I'm told is a good translation into Esperanto). I found particularly funny one line in the poems that mentions Mulan leaving "little brother" behind, in the Disney movie that's her dog's name.
Still, all in all, it's probably one of my favorite Disney movies, its heroic, has a good message (particularly for little girls: you can do anything a man can do) and balances well a G rating with the harshness of war (that scene when they go into the recently hun-plundered village makes me gasp every time).
After a looking googling: "The Disney system was described in: Proceeding of the Second International Symposium on Fireworks. 1994 4", 6", and 8" shells are lifted altitude ranging from 100 feet to 2000. Using air pressure ranging from 20 psi to 120 psi. Their system "Uses an electronic ignitor assembly controlled by remote located computer to detonate the shell in the sky." No further description is provided, other then the statement; "The electronic ignitor need not be inserted in the shell until the actual use." The system is patented, perhaps the patent provides more information. Actually -- On further research. The ignition system is describe in detail in vol. 2! "This electronic ignitor uses an electrolytic capacitor for energy storage, a custom integrated circuit for programming logic and timing, and a conventional pyrotechnic squib for the ignition source." The timing resolution is reported to be; plus/minus 0.015 seconds! They system that releases the compressed air also send a launch sequence to the igniter."
The big news is not in the compressed air:
Disney is in the process of donating all seven patents associated with the new air launch technology to a non-profit organization so these patents can be licensed to other pyrotechnic providers'.
Its nice to see a company using patents correctly, and donating them to an organization who oversees the pyrotechnic industry.
Disney has been under fire for some time about the quantity of pollution generated by the fireworks show. This is mostly to get the AQMD off their backs and their neighbors off their backs. I wonder if they will bother to implement this in Florida ?
Here is an excerpt from miceage.com -
Rather, this surprise move by TDA is caused primarily with some hot water the Park has gotten in with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, or AQMD for short. Readers outside of Southern California may not be familiar with a government body like the AQMD, but they've been setting policy and regulating private enterprise in a successful attempt to reduce the amount of air pollution in Orange and Los Angeles counties for decades now. The Disneyland Resort is one of the 28,000 private businesses that operates with a permit from the AQMD, and is allowed a certain number of "pollution credits" each year. A business like Disneyland can earn credits by enrolling employees in clean air commuting plans that encourage Anaheim Cast Members to carpool, ride their bikes, or take the train to work. Disneyland Cast Members can earn a dollar per day each time they "Clean Air Commute", and Disneyland occasionally raises those stakes to three dollars per day and doles out the cash in paychecks or with gift certificates to Target or other big box retailers. While Disneyland earns credits with good citizen programs like those, it also loses credits by operating polluting engines such as on the Mark Twain or the parking lot trams. And as one of the biggest single site employers in Southern California with a huge physical plant of potential pollution sources, Disneyland often walks a fine line with the AQMD. Photo courtesy of Kevin Yee This regulatory environment that Disneyland operates in is what has led to a need to reduce the amount of smoke and pollution that the nightly fireworks displays pump into the air. Although the vocal group of Anaheim neighbors that got a decent amount of media attention last year with their constant complaints about the noisy and smoky Disneyland fireworks shows haven't helped matters, it's the more definable processes the AQMD uses to measure pollution that led to this situation. In fact, the AQMD's regulations are what led Disneyland to invest several million dollars into a new pneumatic air launching system installed just north of the park this past winter. It was hoped by TDA that this cleaner and less smoky process of launching fireworks into the air from a large block of modern launch tubes dubbed "The Black Forest" by Disneyland's pyro technicians would gain the park some leeway with the AQMD inspectors. Unfortunately however, while the new launch system was effective with the standard fireworks shells that shoot straight up, it left a great deal to be desired from an artistic standpoint with some of the more unique effects. When Believe returned for the Easter Vacation period after its long winter's absence, several of the key effects that defined the Believe show simply weren't able to be accomplished with the new launch system. Most noticeably, the shooting star effect used several times during the show almost ceased to exist. Instead of the graceful arc of a shooting star sailing over the Castle that the Believe designers created, the air launch tubes could only manage an effect that was more like an errant fireworks shell fizzling towards Tomorrowland. The show's original producer Steve Davison, and the artistic professionals of the Disneyland Entertainment Department, were not at all amused at what the new environmentally friendly launch system had done with their show. And within a few weeks the tinkering that had begun on Believe during surprise showings in May had turned into a realization that a new show was needed that would satisfy
http://ayup.co.uk/shuttup/shuttup2-0.html
Falklands Island war between the UK and Argentina - the Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet SSM whose explosive payload did not detonate. The damage (and subsequent sinking) was caused by the rocket fuel.
More likely, he's referring to the fact that The Lion King is almost entirely ripped-off from a 60s Japanese TV cartoon called "Kimba the White Lion." (Even the name Simba sounds like the name of the hero from the Japanese series!)
See this page for more details about this.
To my knowledge, Mulan is 'in the clear' copyright wise, but The Lion King is obviously in violation.
Comment of the year
If this site(bottom of page - rockets & missles) is accurate, three quarters of makeup of traditional rockets is propellant. With that removed, it would seem a lot more space is available for the stars/effects portion of the charge. It seems this could pave the way for much more sophisticated effects being created, if this type of firework is predominant in professional displays...
"It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork."
The Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun was used in the Spanish-American war.
Amen. I was kind of troubled when my family took me to Disney World.... being there, everything seemed almost the embodiment of annoyingly crass commercialism, almost like a disembodied head of the pro-globalization movement. Nothing was more than a millimeter deep, and everywhere you looked was the hawking of 100-fold price-jacked-up pieces of quickly discarded worthless merchendise made by sweatshop labor overseas. If "Disneyworld" was supposed to be all tinkerbell and fairy dust, all I could see was the support strings and the fairy-dust-inhalation-induced cancers.
:)
But then a company like that goes and does something like this... creates an actually clever twist on an old piece of technology, and then gives it away for free. And I also remember how they took on, not too long ago, the Christian Coalition and its ilk in order to provide domestic partner benefits....
It all leaves one conflicted; are they evil or are they not?
I'm an owl exterminator!
1/4 Way down the page
Having helped with a couple fireworks shows, they are much more fun to produce than they are to watch. The job is coveted by local fire departments and small pyrotechnic companies that are hard to get into (Family connections got me in). These people strongly resist measures that make it less fun to do, even electrical ignition was scoffed at as 'button pushing'. Much cooler to be right there in the blast and flash and rain of fire. Compressed air launch? LAME!
I was at Disneyland on 23 June 2004. The display was wonderful. While they did not mention that display was being launched by air, they did state in English, Spanish, and Japanese that the display was powered by HP.
Am I alone in finding Disney's conflicting practices downright befuddling?
"We're a multi-billion dollar conglomerate buying up controlling interest in virtually every market."
"Watch 'Home on the Range,' a movie about small time businessmen getting ground under by the heel of evil corporations."
"We oppose the flow of information and ideas through copyrights expiring. 75 years isn't long enough!"
"We just made some revolutionary technology. Here, have it for free."
What corporate schizophrenia is going on here?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
The Disneyland fireworks still boom, quite loudly I might add. I hear them every night from my house, about 4 miles away.
On another note, they're a lot brighter now, too. Overall, they just look a lot better. It used to be that every night it would smell smoky everywhere in the surrounding area (by which I mean anywhere in the parks and outside on Harbor Blvd, not that I can actually smell the fireworks 4 miles away), and a few minutes into the firework show, there would be this increasingly large cloud of smoke that caught the light from the fireworks, which looked quite ugly.
i spent a few months living with palestinians in the gaza strip. many people there own egyptian made kalishnakovs. the only thing i've ever seen them used for is shooting in the air at weddings, funerals, and political demonstrations. they are certainly completely useless against anything the israelis have. i don't think people there own these because they are a useful weapon. it's more symbolic, like the knives sikhs are required to carry as a part of their religion (though i don't mean to imply the symbolism in this case has anything to do with islam). i've never heard of anyone getting killed in that part of the world due to stray wedding bullets. but almost everyone i met there knew someone (usually a relative) who was killed by israeli weapons. in contrast, of all the people i met in israel, i never met anyone who actually knew someone who was killed by a suicide bomber.
for americans i think the situation is similar. as an american i can say that most of us don't actually know anyone who has been killed by terrorists. but most iraqis probably know someone who has been killed by americans. (i haven't been to iraq, though, so i don't know. i imagine most iraqis also probably know someone who was killed by saddam's regime -- another parallel with the palestinian situation, most people there know someone who was killed by the palestinian authority, though there is really no comparison between arafat's pathetic little israeli controlled dictatorship and saddam's police state).
anyway, i know this is off topic, and i ask the moderators to moderate it accordingly. but i think it is necessary to respond to people who equate muslims shooting in the air at weddings with terrorists. i don't think i met any terrorists in gaza (since they couldn't escape to terrorize anything even if they wanted to. most of them just wanted to escape to find work). and it's really hard to call iraqis resisting a foreign occupation of their own country terrorists.
sorry for posting AC. i'm really just too lazy to create an account.