Marvel fans who want to fly like Iron Man will be grabbed by a robotic arm from a car factory and spun around like a paint mixer on a new attraction in a superhero-themed land at the Disneyland Resort.
Construction on the Stark Flight Lab attraction will begin in 2025 as part of the expansion that will double the size of Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure.
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The new attraction in the Marvel-themed land will be set in Tony Stark’s workshop, where, according to the attraction’s backstory, the Avengers invent, develop and test new technologies needed to defend the universe.
Passengers will be briefed by the billionaire and genius playboy inventor before being loaded into two-person capsules for a test flight. Robotic arms will grab the capsules and whirl the passengers around in a simulated flight.
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Robert Downey Jr., who will play supervillain Doctor Doom in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, will reprise his role as Tony Stark/Iron Man for DCA’s Stark Flight Lab.
Stark Flight Lab looks like two rides in one – with a stationary Kuka RoboCoaster motion simulator and a separate ride experience on a crawler track.
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The concept art for Stark Flight Lab shows a multi-step process in which passengers board a two-person capsule, dock at a base attached to a rail, detach from the base for the Kuka robotic arm experience, and then reattach to the docking station to continue down the rail.
Six stationary Kuka robot arms are located in a horseshoe-shaped section of the track visible from the charging station, according to the concept image. Riders wear shoulder harnesses as they twist, turn and tip from side to side.
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Concept art is just that – artistic representations of concept ideas in development, designed to give fans an idea of what to expect from the planned attraction. The final attraction could look very different than what is shown in the drawings.
Kuka RoboCoasters have been used at the Knights Tournament at Legoland California, Sum of All Thrills at Epcot, and the motion-based dark rides “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey” at several Universal parks.
Kuka’s 6-axis robotic arms can be programmed with a variety of motion profiles and even allow riders to customize their thrill level.
The Sum of All Thrills attraction, which operated at Epcot in Florida until 2016, allowed visitors to customize their experience by adjusting the intensity, acceleration and inversion levels.
The intensity level ranged from gentle to extreme on the “Knights Tournament” ride, which ran at Legoland until 2019.
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In addition, construction will begin in 2025 on a second new attraction at DCA’s Avengers Campus: the e-ticket dark ride “Avengers Infinity Defense,” which has been in development since 2019.
Opening dates for Stark Flight Lab or Avengers Infinity Defense have not yet been announced.
Disneyland has not yet announced whether the two new Avengers Campus attractions will open at the same time – but that’s unlikely. Spacing the opening dates by a year or two would give Disneyland the opportunity to market each of the attractions individually – and thus get more for its money.
Concept art for the Avengers Campus expansion shows the new buildings for the attractions extending into the last remaining section of the original Disneyland parking lot behind the Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout drop ride.
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