Being trapped in the air on an uncontrollable object causes a certain kind of dread. Not a plane; at the very least, airplanes have restrooms, cabins, and a person whose sole responsibility is to provide comfort. No, this is the kind of helplessness that occurs on a ride in a theme park where you are strapped into a chair that is fastened to a chain, spinning in a broad circle about two hundred feet above San Antonio, Texas, and all of a sudden everything stops.
That’s what happened at Six Flags Fiesta Texas on April 26, 2026, when a ride operator stopped the Supergirl Sky Flight, a starflyer-style swing ride that raises riders and spins them around at a significant height. It turned out that neither a mechanical malfunction nor a weather issue was the cause. A cell phone had been taken out.
That day, Maria Salazar, her spouse, and friends rode along. Although Six Flags itself put the duration closer to seven minutes, she told Storyful that the experience lasted between ten and fifteen minutes. There’s a gap there, and it’s important to remember that seven minutes spent doing nearly anything else probably doesn’t feel nearly as long as seven minutes spent suspended motionless at two hundred feet. To put it simply, Salazar said, “It was scary to have to wait up in the air, unable to move.” Surprisingly, she also captured the incident on camera. The video, which featured riders sitting in their swing chairs with their legs hanging against an expansive sky, quickly gained millions of views on TikTok and Instagram in a matter of days.
In a statement, Six Flags confirmed the closure, claiming that a ride operator saw a visitor using a cell phone, which is against the park’s safety regulations. At parks like these, cell phone use is prohibited on operating rides, and for good reason. When a phone is dropped two hundred feet, it becomes a projectile. It might strike a child, a bystander below, or another rider. There is nothing difficult about the physics. Even though most people probably consider the policy to be more of a suggestion than a rule, it is in place because disregarding it can have dire consequences. The ride resumed after the phone was secured, and according to Six Flags, every passenger left without incident. For the remainder of the day, the ride remained open.
The public’s response, however, is intriguing. Every clip has a split in the comments. Rules are rules, safety is important, and using a phone at that altitude is actually dangerous, according to one camp, so the operator did exactly the right thing. The opposing viewpoint contends that stopping a ride in midair and leaving more than a dozen people stranded in the sky poses a unique risk, or at the very least, a unique form of terror. The argument hasn’t really settled because both sides have a point.
It’s difficult to ignore the emergence of a pattern. Superman the Ride at Six Flags New England in Massachusetts abruptly stopped, forcing riders to evacuate just days prior to the Supergirl Sky Flight incident. The optics stack up despite the different ride, state, and problem. Trust is the foundation of theme parks. In essence, visitors are consenting to being thrown around quickly, inverted, dropped, and spun while trusting that every system and procedure will work. The stories spread quickly when that trust falters even a little.
Located on the northwest side of San Antonio, tucked away against the old quarry walls, Six Flags Fiesta Texas has been in operation since 1992. According to the park’s own description, the Supergirl Sky Flight rises higher than those limestone walls and offers a “truly breathtaking” view. However, the marketing copy cheerfully adds that riders will be spinning too fast to appreciate it. After a weekend where riders had all the time in the world to enjoy the scenery while standing motionless and waiting for someone below to figure out how to bring them down, that language now reads a little differently.
The entire episode poses a question that theme parks will likely have to continue to address: how do you enforce a no-phone policy on a ride that is already in motion in a time when everyone’s first instinct is to reach for their phone, especially during something dramatic or unusual? Undoubtedly, stopping everything in midair serves as enforcement. It’s a completely different story if it functions as a customer experience.
