Susan Bonds' Heart-Pounding, Spine-Tingling, Hair-Raising
Adventure A Georgia Tech graduate turns the Indiana Jones™ saga into Disneyland's wildest ride By John Dunn PHOTOS © DISNEY/LUCASFILM LTD.
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ife for Susan Bonds is one spinetingling, breathtaking, cliff-hanging thrill after another. When she's I not traversing a shaky suspension I 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 worlo,. 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 40
GEORGIA TECH • Summer 1995
new ride in 40 "Tt'c a TxnlH Irinrl
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of out-of-control experience," agrees Bonds. "It's definitely an fl innovative tech^te nology." In addition to ^ ^ B creating the ^^^^^^B Indiana Jones™ Adventure, WDI—the creative development, design and engineering subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co.—developed and patented the ride's Enhanced Motion Vehicles, each of which has an on-board ride-control computer. Each ridecontrol computer contains multiple programmed versions of the adventure, with
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