What is Airtime? | Pleasure Beach Resort

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]I'm Stuart. This is Pleasure Beach, and today we're answering one of the most frequent questions we see in our comments. What is airtime? You know that feeling that you're on a ride, you go over the top of something, a hill, a drop, a swing, and just for a second your stomach completely disappears. It floats somewhere near your chin, your bum lifts up off the seat, and your brain goes, "What is happening now?"

[00:00:35]That feeling has a name. Riders call it airtime, and this thing right here, Ivictus, is Pleasure Beach's brand new ride. It's basically an airtime machine the size of a building. So, today we're going to answer three questions. What actually is airtime? How much of it does Ivictus give you? And, because we're going full nerd, how do you actually measure it scientifically?

[00:00:59]Let's take a look. So, airtime. Let's start simple. Airtime's what happens when a ride moves away from you faster than gravity is pulling you down. The seat drops, your body being a bit slow on the uptake hasn't got the memo yet, so it keeps going in the direction it was heading, upward. And, for a moment you're basically floating. It's the exact reason your stomach lurches when a lift drops too fast or when you drive over a humped bridge too quickly. Your body just briefly forgets it has any weight. Here's the nerdy bit, and I promise it is actually quite interesting. It all comes down to G-force. G-force is just a way of measuring how heavy you feel. Right now, sitting on your sofa or office chair or me standing here, you're at 1 G. That's normal. Jump on a roller coaster at the bottom of a drop and you might hit 3 or 4 G.

[00:01:46]You feel like you weigh three or four times as much, pushed into your seat.

[00:01:51]But, go over a hill or a peak of a swing and it drops towards zero G. That's weightlessness, and that is airtime. And there are actually two different types of it. Floater airtime, it's the gentle one. Imagine slowly drifting out of your seat like someone's very politely lifting you by the shoulders. And ejector airtime, it's a bit less peaceful but more thrilling. It's the ride [music] basically trying to yeet you up into the sky, sharp and sudden.

[00:02:19]It's terrifying, and people absolutely love it. You'll hear the screams behind me soon. Okay. So, here's why it actually happens, and this is the proper physics. So, I'm going to go a bit technical for a second, but stay with me, it's worth it. Newton's first law of motion says that an object in motion wants to keep moving in the same direction, and your body is an object.

[00:02:40]When you go in up the arc of a swing or the crest of a hill, your body's moving upwards. The moment the ride tips over and starts pulling away from you, continuing back down, your body's inertia means it keeps going up for just a moment. The seat leaves you weightlessness. The measurement we use is G-force, calculated as the difference between the acceleration you're experiencing and the acceleration due to gravity divided by G.

[00:03:06]At one G, you feel normal. At zero G, you're in freefall. Go below zero G into negative, and forces are actively pulling you up, and that's peak ejector airtime. On a Gyro Swing [music] like the Vertigo, it works a little bit differently to a roller coaster. Instead of going over a hill, you're in the end of a giant pendulum, swinging up, slowing down, and dropping back down again. At the very peak of that arc, 138 ft up in the air, your body's momentum is still carrying you upwards while gravity has already started to pull you back. That gap between the two, that's your airtime.

[00:03:44]And here's the extra twist, literally.

[00:03:47]The gondola on the Vertigo doesn't just swing, it rotates at the same time. That introduces something called the Coriolis effect, an additional sideways force caused by moving in a rotating system.

[00:03:59]Depending on where you're sitting on the gondola, [music] that Coriolis force either adds to or subtracts from what you're already feeling. Outer edge seats tend to be the wildest, but because the gondola rotates a different direction each cycle, you've lots of opportunities on any cycle to experience it.

[00:04:17]So, before we get to the main event, let's have a wander around the park because Pleasure Beach really is genuinely stacked with rides that do interesting things to your G-forces, and most people don't realize it.

[00:04:29]First up then, one of my favorite coasters, The Big One. When it opened, it was the tallest coaster in the entire world. I can hear the lift hill behind actually, so you might be lucky enough to see it going up behind me. But, at 235 ft, it's an absolute icon of British seaside culture.

[00:04:46]And it looks terrifying from the ground.

[00:04:49]And from up there.

[00:04:51]In airtime terms, it's not a modern ejector machine. The hills are big and sweeping rather than sharp and aggressive, but there are three airtime hills in a row after that first massive drop where you get proper floater airtime, rising gently out of your seat as the train crests each one.

[00:05:09]The sheer speed makes it feel huge as well as looking it.

[00:05:14]Next to me is the Big Dipper. It's over 100 years old, but it's still going strong. It's a lovely classic wooden coaster with a series of old school camel back hills, literally the original airtime design. Made up of hills, speed, and that floating feeling. A little bit of history, but a lot of fun.

[00:05:33]And with it just behind me, it'd be rude not to include Icon. It's the newest coaster in the park, and honestly, it's a brilliant all-rounder with pops of airtime throughout, but the showstopper is the launches. It fires you from 0 to over 50 miles an hour twice, throws you through the Immelmann, and it's as smooth as anything. A different kind of thrill, all speed and surprise rather than just focusing on on weightlessness.

[00:05:58]Right, here we go. A Victus, 8.72 million pounds, the UK's tallest Gyro Swing, 138 ft tall. 40 seats in a big circular gondola, and it swings just like a pendulum, going higher and higher each pass until it's hitting 120° from vertical. That means at the top of each swing, your feet are pointing higher than your head. You're essentially upside down, ish. And it's enormous, not just in size, but in what it does to you. Instead of over-the-shoulder harnesses that clamp down around you, a Victus uses lap bars. Nothing across your chest at all, nothing pushing you down on your shoulders. Your whole upper body is completely free, and obviously, completely safe. It's about how it makes you feel.

[00:06:43]When you reach the top of that arc, 138 ft up, nearly upside down, with just a lap bar between you and the Lancashire sky, you're going to feel every single bit of that airtime.

[00:06:55]Okay, so here's where we're going to get properly nerdy, because airtime isn't just a vibe. It's genuinely measurable, and we're going to be measuring it today with an accelerometer.

[00:07:06]It measures the forces acting on it, up, down, left, right, forward, back, in real time. In scientific terms, it measures acceleration across three axes, and reports it as G-force values. Here's what we're looking for. Before the ride starts, it reads 1G on the vertical axis, and that's normal gravity. The moment you hit weightlessness on a ride, that number drops towards 0G, going negative, meaning the accelerometer is actually reading forces pulling away from your seat.

[00:07:35]And we don't have to guess what that looks like, cuz we've got the real data recorded on a real ride right here.

[00:07:43]If you map out a full ride on a Victus, you see exactly the repeating wave we predicted. At the bottom of each swing, 4.54 G at the peak. That's you being pressed so hard into your seat, you can feel it in your face. As you swing upward, the number drops. At the top, near zero, then it rises again as you swing back down. Every single swing for the whole ride. The swing cycle on a Victus runs at roughly 6.1 seconds. So, every 6 seconds, you're going from nearly 5 G at the bottom to near weightlessness up at the top and back again repeatedly.

[00:08:21]As for airtime, the real numbers are pretty extraordinary. Across the ride, we recorded 14 separate airtime events.

[00:08:28]Total time spent being below 0.5 G was 19 seconds, and nearly 13 of those were below 0.3 G. That's not just floating, that's near zero gravity. The two peak swings were definitely the standout moments. Back-to-back at the very top of the ride's arc, 2.41 seconds of weightlessness on one swing and 2.44 seconds on the next. The lowest point recorded across the whole ride, 0.006 G. At 138 ft in the air, essentially zero gravity for over 2 seconds.

[00:09:03]But the point is, this isn't one moment of weightlessness, it's many. It keeps happening, which is either wonderful or absolutely terrifying, depending on how you feel about having no weight.

[00:09:15]So, the last question, why do people love this? Well, let's hear it from them.

[00:09:21]>> It's that amazing feeling that you get at the top of this ride, when you feel like you're leaving your seat and you have this kind of moment of weightlessness. It's the thing that enthusiasts crave, and I get why because I'm an enthusiast, so it's part of the excitement of going on a ride like this.

[00:09:38]>> So, airtime is that feeling when you're in negative G, so you actually [music] rise out of your seat, and this one is like it's absolutely packed with it.

[00:09:47]>> So, airtime for me is the best sensation on a flat ride or a roller coaster. It's that feeling of your your backside lifting up off the seat as you experience intense and fun thrills on a ride. And for me, as a roller coaster junkie, it's just an incredible feeling which you get on a Victus.

[00:10:04]>> Adrenaline fires, cortisol fires, and then almost immediately your brain goes, "Oh, wait. I'm fine. I'm strapped into a ride and everything's okay." And the relief floods as dopamine. You get a hit of genuine joy triggered by a fraction of a second of controlled fear. It's a cheat code for your nervous system, basically, and humans have been seeking it out here at Pleasure Beach for 130 years. Weightlessness is something your body almost never experiences in real life. It's genuinely alien to us. It's the closest most of us will ever get to what astronauts feel in orbit. For two or three seconds, gravity just stops, and your brain has no idea what to do with that.

[00:10:47]A Victus is now open at Pleasure Beach Resort. 138 ft, lap bars, 40 seats going nearly upside down over Blackpool, the UK's tallest gyro swing, and based on everything we know from the physics and from the people who've ridden it, one of the best airtime rides in the country.

[00:11:07]So, whether you're a total thrill-seeker, someone who's never thought about what a G-force is, or a physics teacher looking for a really great trip idea, hopefully now you know exactly what you're in for.

[00:11:19]Airtime, you've felt it before, you just might not have known what to call it.

[00:11:23]We'll see you at Pleasure Beach Resort soon.

[00:11:28]>> [music] >> Mhm.