Bat

Kings Island has a complicated history with suspended coasters. The original Bat, built by Arrow Development and opened in 1981, was the first modern suspended roller coaster anywhere — cars hanging beneath an overhead track rather than riding on top of it — but chronic mechanical failures in its banking and braking systems forced Kings Island to remove it after only three operating seasons in 1983.

A decade later, Arrow Dynamics — by then a distinct successor to the original Arrow Development, having refined the suspended-coaster concept on rides like Big Bad Wolf — built an improved suspended coaster for Kings Island's Action Zone in 1993, opening it as Top Gun. The redesigned ride swings cars through a 90-foot lift, a 70-foot valley drop, and a horseshoe element across a 2,352-foot circuit at up to 51 mph, without the structural problems that doomed its 1981 predecessor.

Kings Island renamed the ride Flight Deck in 2008 to match a broader chain-wide branding shift, then restored the Bat name in 2013 — deliberately reclaiming the legendary title of the troubled original ride for a coaster that had, by then, run reliably for two decades.

The current Bat shares only its name and general suspended-coaster concept with the 1981 original; the track, structure, and site are entirely different, but the name still carries the weight of one of Kings Island's most notorious ride stories.