08/14/2026
“When Zipliners Are Are Not to Breaking (sic)…”
…they’re free to enjoy the ride.
Looking back at this week’s conversations—braking-system failures, spring arrays, emergency braking, standards, inspections, insurance, accident investigations, and safer product design—one principle keeps surfacing:
(The zipliner should not be the braking system.)
When riders are not asked to brake, they are free to smile, film, share—and return.
After investigating more than 100 zipline matters and spending decades designing, manufacturing, inspecting, testing, and analyzing these systems, I keep coming back to the same engineering question:
Why assign a life-safety function to the least-trained person in the system—the customer?
A better approach is to engineer the braking system around foreseeable variables:
Rider mass. Arrival speed. Cable slope. Temperature. Wind. Friction. Spring compression. Trolley performance. Brake-zone distance. And component failure.
Then ask the harder question:
What happens when something doesn't work as intended?
That is where fail-safe engineering at Safer Designs (see our website) matters.
At Safer Designs, our objective for 2027 is straightforward: continue developing braking systems that remove braking responsibility from the rider and help address one of the most persistent hazards I see in zipline accident investigations—braking-related incidents.
Our philosophy is simple:
Design the ride so the trolley may occasionally stop a rider too soon—but, at a Six Sigma level, rarely too late.
Because the best zipline experience isn't a rider thinking:
"When do I brake?"
It's a rider thinking:
“That was awesome. Let's go again.”
