Some of Ed Pribonic’s fondest memories of youth are of endless summer days bounding from ride to ride at Kennywood Park. “My dad was on the school board, and we got a lot of free tickets,” said Pribonic, 58, who grew up in Port Vue. “Kennywood was our place.” Forces of attraction and repulsion have since pushed and pulled Pribonic between Pittsburgh and California during an engineering career that began in the fiery steel mills of McKeesport, before leading to the magical gates of Disneyland. It was his development of a magnetic braking system for roller coasters, however, that has been drawing him back home to Pittsburgh more often in recent years, where his mother and two sisters still live, to make important safety modifications to the rides that thrilled him as a child. Kennywood Entertainment Co. has been a reliable customer, sticking by his company, Magnetar Technologies Inc., as it has successfully defended itself from a patent infringement lawsuit by Swiss amusement ride manufacturing giant Intamin AG. “It’s always a kick to come back to Kennywood,” he said. “People take it for granted, but it has an excellent reputation in the industry worldwide.” The venerable park opens its gates for its 107th season Saturday. “Ed is well respected in the industry,” said Rich Henry, Kennywood’s veteran director of administrative services who began his Kennywood career as a college student in 1972, pulling the lever on the manual skid brakes on the Jack Rabbit coaster. Henry says Pribonic’s magnetic brakes provide a simple, elegant solution to having to rely on people to stop the coasters in the job he used to do. That became a heightened concern following a 1999 accident on the Thunderbolt coaster in which a train reentering the station collided with the train being loaded — when the ride operators failed to engage the manual brakes. To fix it, Kennywood brought in Pribonic, who was working as an amusement industry consultant, to install sensors that automatically activate the coaster’s pinch brakes. Kennywood subsequently engaged Pribonic’s Magnetar Technologies to install a magnetic braking system on its Wild Mouse ride at Idlewild Park in Ligonier. Thrilled with that job, Kennywood then gave him two jobs at once in 2002 — installing the magnetic brake systems on the Jack Rabbit and Phantom’s Revenge coasters. On the Phantom’s Revenge, Henry said, the train was coming into the station too fast, resulting in a harsh stop. The magnetic brakes “trim the speed before the train enters the station,” he said, then mechanical brakes stop the train and hold it until the train loading in the station begins its climb up the hill. “The great feature of these brakes is that they’re zero maintenance, and they’re beautifully foolproof,” Henry said. Henry said that Pribonic may be called on at this season’s end to engineer a new sensor system for the Racer. If completed, he will have done work on all four of the park’s coasters. Pribonic’s first job after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970 with an engineering degree was with U.S. Steel Corp. at its National Tube plant in McKeesport. In 1978, he moved to California, working for an oil company and a steel engineering consulting firm. In 1987, his wife saw a help wanted ad for an engineering manager at Disneyland, and on a lark he sent a resume. “By 1987, things were real bad for the steel industry, so I took the job,” he said. At Disney, he advanced to its Imagineering development group, which produces new ideas for Disney’s theme parks. There, he helped develop the Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones rides at Disneyland. By 1993, Pribonic had decided to start his own amusement industry consulting business, working for companies that operated Sea World, Six Flags and Knotts Berry Farm. One client in Portland, Ore., asked him to install an automated braking system on a Wild Mouse ride after a few accidents where teenage employees were not paying attention and failed to pull the brake lever on returning vehicles. “I had seen drop towers that used magnetic brakes, and I thought, ‘These can be used on roller coasters,'” he said. Intamin AG, the Swiss manufacturer of Kennywood’s Pitfall tower, which employs magnetic brakes to stop riders’ 250-foot direct vertical descent, did not have a system for use on roller coasters, he said. Unable to find anyone to sell him magnetic brakes, Pribonic decided to build his own. “I did some research and contacted magnet suppliers. We engineered our own set and put them on,” he said. “The owner of that ride, Funtastic Shows, went around bragging about the ride, and I started getting requests to design and build brakes.” Despite his initial success, he was not totally confident in his own grasp of magnetics, and sought out Marc Thomson, an expert on the subject at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Thomson helped devise a system where a magnetic fin attached to the bottom of the roller coaster train passes through magnets encased in an aluminum tube and bolted to the track. “The conductive fin travels through the brakes and an electrodynamic interaction produced by the brake and fin produces a drag force that slows down the train,” Thomson said. While Pribonic’s new brakes and experience in the industry have drawn positive response from parks like Kennywood, it has also drawn the ire of Intamin AG, which sued Pribonic for allegedly infringing on its magnetic brake patents. Pribonic may have further irked Intamin by testifying against the company in a lawsuit involving a 1999 accident at Six Flags Darien Lake Park near Buffalo, where a rider was injured after being ejected from the Superman Ride of Steel in 1999. He also was consulted by Knotts Berry Farm in Buena Vista, Calif., to install a secondary seat belt on its Intamin-built Perilous Plunge boat ride, after a woman was ejected and killed in 2001. In January, a federal judge in California dismissed Intamin’s lawsuit, concluding that Intamin had attempted to intimidate Pribonic. A Intamin spokesman could not be reached for comment. Bill Childs, a law professor at Western New England College School of Law and a theme park enthusiast, said that although an appeal from Intamin is likely, the court’s decision is a huge victory for Pribonic. “For a relatively small company like Magnetar, having a suit like Intamin’s dismissed, especially so emphatically and for such broad reasons, can open a lot of doors,” he said, adding that it probably has been difficult for Magnetar to pick up new customers while the lawsuit was hanging over it. Pribonic’s interest in roller coasters is not limited to his profession. He remains, as in his youth, a coaster enthusiast. He said his favorite ride at Kennywood is the Thunderbolt. “The (Phantom’s) Revenge has a heck of a drop, but the Thunderbolt has multiple drops, and some great laterals, and everywhere you look, there are views to keep you excited,” he said.

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---