If you're a roller coaster fan, you only have until August 2 to travel to Atlanta to experience one of the best-reviewed rides on the planet.
The amusement park Fun Spot America Atlanta, which sank a reported $18 million into opening the thrilling steel coaster ArieForce One in 2023, has announced the park, which has never attracted blockbuster attendance, will not survive this summer.
The privately owned park in Fayetteville, Georgia, aspired to make a mark in the coaster world by commissioning and opening ArieForce One. The custom-built ride is 3,400 feet long, 155 feet tall, a 146-foot drop at a 83-degree angle, speeds up to 64 mph, and has four inversions, including the United States' "largest zero-G stall," which holds riders upside-down and weightless for a long stretch of track.
And make a mark it did. In 2023, ArieForce One earned the Best New Roller Coaster honor in the Golden Ticket Awards, a respected industry honor.
The ride, which has a reputation for remarkably smooth movement and relentless "air time" (a feeling of weightlessness), went on to collect top rankings from USA Today, popular YouTube channels Airtime Thrills and Coaster Studios, and from many roller coaster fans across many online forums.
Now many coaster enthusiasts are "making an emergency trip...to the Atlanta area" (as YouTube's Theme Park Crazy told its 441,000 subscribers) to ride this award winner before it's gone for good.
The coaster's future is uncertain
ArieForce One (its name is a play on the name of its owner, John Arie, Jr.), located south of Atlanta's main airport, did not attract enough crowds to lift the rest of Fun Spot's Atlanta campus, a park with little theming and scanty thrills beyond its marquee attraction.
Even the park's own publicity photos, such as the one at the top of this page, depict the coaster as half-full.
But fans have hope that the ride can be rescued.
“ArieForce is an incredible coaster,” Elizabeth Ringas, president of the American Coaster Enthusiasts, told People. “So we really hope that someone will snatch that up or snatch up the whole park."
Fun Spot announced its last day of operations as August 2, 2026, and it issued a statement that "decisions about the future of our rides and attractions have not been finalized." It's logical to assume that its owners will try to sell the coaster to another park to defray some of its construction debt.
Roller coasters are disassembled and moved to other parks all the time—Phoenix, at Pennsylvania's Knoebels Amusement Resort, is a 1947 coaster that was rescued from a Texas park in the 1980s and still ranks as one of the best wooden coasters ever made.
But some experts suggest that the cost of moving this ride to another location with different topography could exceed the price of simply building a new ride instead.
The owner of Fun Spot America Atlanta also owns two parks in Florida near Disney World and Universal Orlando, but neither of those properties is currently configured to accommodate the size and layout of ArieForce One.
There may be an amusement park out there that would want to pay a little more to obtain a world-class coaster with the reputation that ArieForce One has, but there's no guarantee that park would be inside the United States. Its name would also certainly be changed.
Some great roller coasters endure the test of time. Coney Island's famous Cyclone turned 99 last Friday. Jack Rabbit, at Pittsburgh's Kennywood, turned 106 last month. Even Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds, a steel pioneer built in 1959 with outdated engineering, will close for repairs this month to extend its amusement life.
But as of this moment, ArieForce One in doomed to be remembered as a coaster that touched greatness—only to be felled by financials.
"Despite its greatness, it's set to be one of the shortest-lived coasters ever," opined YouTube's Doctor Coaster.
If you'd like to say you rode it, now's your last chance.
Fun Spot America Atlanta (funspotamericaatlanta.com) is located at 1675 GA-85 in Fayetteville, about 10 miles south of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. ArieForce One costs $12 per ride, or you can pay $40 to ride all day.