Deep in Saxony’s Vogtland, a 30-year-old family park most English-language outlets have never once mentioned has just opened the most technically interesting new ride in Europe this season — and barely anyone outside Germany noticed. Time to fix that.
What happened
On 19 June, Freizeitpark Plohn in Lengenfeld opened Dønnervind, a water coaster built by Mack Rides, as the centrepiece of the park’s 30th-anniversary season. The park bills it as the world’s first multi-launch water coaster: a full circuit in which the boat-trains are accelerated by two electromagnetic launch sections between water passages, finishing in a splashdown by the station. The opening was a properly big deal locally — Saxony’s Minister President Michael Kretschmer rode the first train — and the park puts the investment at around €11.5 million (£10m), comfortably the largest in its history.
The detail
Figures below are from the park’s technical presentation; we’ve not yet measured them with our own stopwatch.
| Spec | Figure |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Mack Rides (Waldkirch, Germany) |
| Track length | 535 m (1,755 ft) |
| Height | 10 m (33 ft) |
| Top speed | 53 km/h (33 mph) |
| Launches | 2 × LSM sections, up to 0.8 g |
| Peak force | 2.7 g |
| Signature elements | Two “High Five” wall elements, a twisted airtime hill, splashdown finale |
| Investment | ~€11.5 million (park figure) |
Note the launch hardware: LSMs — linear synchronous motors, the precise end of the launch catalogue, and a more demanding choice here than it first appears. An LSM works by switching trackside electromagnets in step with permanent magnets carried on the vehicle itself, which means Dønnervind’s boats haul magnet packs through a splashdown several times an hour, sealed against water ingress and corrosion for the life of the ride. The payoff is control: LSM acceleration is computer-timed and repeatable to the millisecond, and that matters more on a water coaster than a dry one, because launch weight swings wildly with rider load and with however much water the boat is still carrying.
What it actually means
First, the claim — because “world’s first” is this industry’s most abused phrase, and this one needs an asterisk applied precisely. Launched water coasters already exist: Mack’s own PowerSplash shuttles, like Pulsar at Walibi Belgium (2016), have been firing boats along straight track for a decade. What nobody had built until now is a full-circuit water coaster with multiple launch sections — launches used the way a modern coaster uses them, as pacing and as block boundaries, on a vehicle that also has to survive repeated soakings and shed a swimming pool’s worth of water every lap. The claim holds, on those terms. It’s a real category, not a press-release one.
Second, the manufacturer. This is a conspicuously Mack-shaped ride: nobody else holds the water-coaster pedigree and the launch catalogue in one house, and Dønnervind is those two product lines being cross-bred — precisely the showroom logic you’d expect from a firm that likes to prove a concept, then sell it. Watch the next two years of trade-show brochures: if the concept works commercially, “multi-launch water coaster” becomes a Mack catalogue item, and Plohn will have been the demonstration model. Mack’s other 2026 storyline is the opposite kind of export: planning filings point to a Mack Spinning Coaster heading for Legoland Windsor, a design the firm barely needs to change between parks.
Third — and this is the story English-language coverage misses entirely — the park. Freizeitpark Plohn is a family-run regional park in the Vogtland, nowhere near a major city, spending €11.5m on a single attraction. That’s the German regional-park market in one data point: an ecosystem of mid-sized, often family-owned parks (Plohn, Toverland’s German cousins, Tripsdrill, Karls) investing at a level UK regional parks simply don’t, because German day-trip tourism sustains it and state politicians turn up to ride the result. When the Minister President takes the maiden voyage, the subtext is regional economics, not theming.
The Dispatch verdict
A genuinely new ride category, correctly claimed (with the asterisk applied), from the manufacturer best placed to build it, at a park that deserved a bigger headline than it got. Whether 53 km/h of launched boat delivers thrills or merely dampness is a question for a future visit — but as a piece of industrial strategy, Dønnervind is the smartest small ride of the year, and the Vogtland is briefly the centre of the water-coaster world.
Forty English-language sites didn’t rewrite this press release. That’s rather the point of this one.
Further reading: how launch systems actually work, our guide to Mack Rides and the rest of the manufacturers, a similar regional park-and-manufacturer pairing at Toverland, and Tivoli Gardens’ rather different approach to a 2026 headline attraction.