Six Flags Retires the X2 Roller Coaster for Good

Six Flags Magic Mountain will permanently retire X2, its 4th-dimension coaster, after riders alleged brain injuries on the rotating-seat ride. Park president Brian Oerding announced the decision on September 29, 2026. The attraction had sat closed since the evening of July 12, after two women needed emergency brain surgery.

Oerding said X2 passed a multitude of safety tests and that guest confidence had been affected. Lawyers have since sued the park and the train maker over those July rides, and over an earlier case that already ended in a confidential settlement.

Six Flags Walks Away From Its Own Prototype

In a note on the park site, Oerding said the company would permanently retire X2 after almost 20 years, a clock the park is running from the 2008 relaunch, not from the 2002 debut of the original ride known as X.

While X2 consistently passed a multitude of safety tests, we have decided to close the ride because we believe it’s the right thing to do. Ride safety is a cornerstone of our business, and when we see guest confidence affected, we take it seriously.

Brian Oerding, Six Flags Magic Mountain park president, park blog, September 29, 2026

He said that since X2 opened in 2008 it has welcomed more than 16 million guests and earned a passionate following among ride fans. He thanked the crews who ran and maintained it. He did not discuss the lawsuits, and Six Flags has said it does not comment on pending cases.

That guest-count is the park’s own figure, and it is the core of the defense X2 always had: most people got off fine. The July injuries, and a pile of older brain-bleed claims, are why a signature ride is being pulled anyway.

Gary A. Dordick, the Beverly Hills lawyer whose firm filed the new cases, called the shutdown overdue and said it does not end the claims. “Today Six Flags Magic Mountain finally did what it should have done long ago,” he said on September 29. “X2 is closed for good.”

The Extra Rails That Flip the Seats

X2 was not a normal wing coaster. Riders sat in pairs on either side of the track, and the seats could pitch a full circle forward or back while the train followed the rails. The park sold that motion hard, promising 360-degree rotating seats and head-first, face-down drops as a daredevil rite.

The hardware that made the trick work was a second pair of rails. Two rails carried the train. Two more rose and fell beside them and turned the seats through a rack-and-pinion gear, so a rider’s head could be whipped through a rotation the chassis itself was not making. Designer Alan Schilke built that system for Arrow Dynamics. X was Arrow’s last coaster, and a prototype. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2001 after cost overruns on the project, before the public opening on January 12, 2002.

Six Flags spent an estimated $45 million to get X open, then about $10 million in 2007 and 2008 to rebuild it as X2 with lighter S&S trains, air-released restraints, onboard audio, and flame effects. It reopened on May 24, 2008, on Baja Ridge in Valencia, California. Regulars already treated a still head as part of the ride. Some told friends to pin their skull to the pad for the whole circuit, which is another way of saying a loose head can get slapped by the very rotation the park advertised.

X2 BY THE NUMBERS

Those figures come from the 175-foot lift and 76 mph listing in Roller Coaster DataBase, which now records the ride as standing but not operating. Linear g-force on paper is not the fight in court. The fight is whether extra rotation, and a head banging a rest, can tear veins inside the skull even when the posted g-number looks ordinary.

Two Surgeries in Six Days

Pamela Guillen, 39, rode X2 on July 5, 2026, during a trip from Hawaii for her daughter’s 16th birthday. The complaint says she kept hitting her head on the rest. When the train stopped, her daughter found her sitting with a vacant stare and her mouth open. Guillen stumbled off, vomited, and collapsed.

At Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, a CT scan showed a severe subdural hematoma and brain compression. Surgeons removed part of her skull. She did not wake for two weeks. “Everything went blank,” Guillen later said. “My next memory is waking up in the hospital about two weeks later.” She said she had been intubated, was in a coma, and spent almost a month in the hospital.

Naomi Greer-Wilkinson, 25, of Los Angeles, boarded with her siblings Emma and Oscar on July 11, six days after Guillen’s injury. The complaint says Six Flags already knew Guillen had left the same ride neurologically wrecked, and that it kept running X2 without warning the next guests. Naomi stumbled, lost consciousness, and was found to have massive bleeding inside the skull. She had several emergency craniotomies. The filing describes her as bedridden, on a ventilator, unable to speak, and barely able to move, in a minimally conscious state, with some ability to open her eyes.

Christopher Bulone, a Dordick partner, said her parents, Artemis and Josh, were with her every day and still waiting for her to breathe on her own. Doctors who treated both women attributed the injuries to a traumatic rapid acceleration-deceleration event on the ride, according to the firm and to medical records described in later public accounts of the cases.

THE JULY SHUTDOWN

1. July 5, 2026: Guillen rides X2, collapses, and undergoes emergency brain surgery at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Los Angeles County Fire Department is called that evening about an unconscious person at the park.
2. July 11, 2026: Greer-Wilkinson rides the same coaster with her siblings and also needs emergency brain surgery.
3. July 12, 2026: Six Flags takes X2 down that evening. It never runs again.
4. September 21, 2026: Three lawsuits are filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Magic Mountain, Six Flags, and S&S Worldwide.
5. September 29, 2026: Oerding announces the permanent retirement.

Cal/OSHA opened an inspection of the July 5 incident. Spokesperson Denisse Gómez said in August that the review was still open and that the agency would not add detail while it continued. A third new plaintiff, Los Angeles attorney Michael Wilk, says he rode in February 2026, later had imaging that showed intracranial bleeding and swelling, and underwent two brain surgeries. His suit says he can no longer practice law.

Hawley, Katerelos and the Cases Before July

The July week did not arrive out of nowhere. The Greer-Wilkinson complaint says Six Flags and related companies had already been sued more than a dozen times over alleged catastrophic brain injuries on X2 or its earlier trains. That count is an allegation in a pleading, not a finding by a judge.

THE NAMED CASES BEHIND THE SHUTDOWN

• Christopher Hawley, 2022: The 22-year-old San Diego State University graduate rode on June 23, 2022, complained of head pain, collapsed, and died the next day after an emergency craniotomy. The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner ruled the death an accident from blunt head trauma in a park ride accident. His parents sued; Six Flags and S&S reached confidential settlements in August 2026, with both companies denying liability and with no finding that the ride was defective.
• Sheila Katerelos, 2020: She alleges a traumatic brain injury and multiple subdural hematomas after an X2 ride on February 16, 2020. Defense experts in that case argued the ride’s acceleration was too low to cause those injuries and that the headrest padding was adequate. A California appeals court kept S&S in the case. Trial is set for August 16, 2027.
• Michael Wilk, February 2026: The third of the September 21 filings, over bleeding that required two operations months after the ride.
• The July pair: Guillen and Greer-Wilkinson, the two emergency surgeries that finally parked the trains.

Dordick Law Corporation says it has been retained by more than 100 additional people who allege brain injuries of varying severity after riding X2 in the past two years, and that more suits will follow. That figure has not been tested in court. At a September press event Dordick also said the firm had heard from still more people and might file as many as 200 cases. Treat those numbers as a lawyer’s intake claim.

For our clients, this decision comes too late. They got on X2 expecting a thrill. Instead, they left with catastrophic brain injuries.

Gary A. Dordick, owner, Dordick Law Corporation, September 29, 2026

On the firm’s case page he added that this decision comes too late for people already hurt, and that closing the ride “does nothing for the people who have already been hurt.” Christopher Bulone put it more bluntly at the September briefing: “No ride like that should be allowed to exist.”

What the Park Still Says the Tests Showed

Six Flags has not admitted that X2 damaged anyone’s brain. In court papers the company has said the ride gets daily inspections and that a rider using it as instructed would not suffer a traumatic brain injury. After Hawley’s death, an engineer involved in the 2008 reopening said in filings that the acceleration forces stayed inside the practices Cal/OSHA uses for amusement rides. A state employee testified that the division looked at the restraints and head padding, received new acceleration data in 2022 that was still within those standards, and allowed the coaster to run again.

That is the gap the retirement does not close. The park’s public line on September 29 was about confidence, not a failed instrument reading. Plaintiffs say the posted g-number never captured a head being rotated independently of the track and then slammed into a rest. S&S Worldwide, the Utah company that supplied the 2008 trains, is a defendant in the new complaints and was a defendant in the Hawley death case it settled.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Treating physicians: Doctors who operated on Guillen and Greer-Wilkinson attributed their hemorrhages to a rapid acceleration-deceleration event on X2, according to the suits and to records later described from those files.
• Park and defense experts: Filings in the older Katerelos and Hawley cases argue that measured forces were too low to cause a subdural hematoma, that padding was adequate, and that inspections kept the ride inside California rules.
• Plaintiffs’ counsel: Dordick and Bulone say the design is defective, the warnings were not, and the park kept running X2 after it had notice of prior bleeds, including Guillen’s collapse six days before Naomi boarded.

A ride that carried more than 16 million people did not injure most of them. Volume is not a medical study, and it is not a substitute for the two charts from the same hospital in the same week. The company chose not to wait for Cal/OSHA to finish, and not to try another season while the new complaints moved.

Asia Still Has Two of These Coasters

Only two other full-size Arrow-style 4th-dimension coasters were built from the same idea. Eejanaika opened in 2006 at Fuji-Q Highland in Japan, taller than X2 at about 250 feet. Dinoconda opened in 2012 at China Dinosaurs Park. S&S took the design after Arrow collapsed and built those two, then stopped making this model. Smaller spin coasters from other makers are a different product.

Those Asian parks now operate the last of the breed that X2 invented. Nothing in the California filings binds them, and there is no public order pulling their trains. The prototype that taught the industry how to rotate a rider off the chassis is the one being cut loose.

The red track is still up on Baja Ridge. The trains are not running, and the July complaints are heading into the part of a case where engineers, not slogans, have to explain what a fourth rail does to a human head.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a 4th-Dimension Roller Coaster?

It is a steel coaster whose seats rotate on a horizontal axis independent of the track, so a rider can face the ground or the sky while the train is doing something else. Schilke has said the idea started with a Zipper carnival ride and sat as a desk animation for years before Six Flags agreed to build it at full size. X2 used four rails, not two, and a rack-and-pinion under each car to drive that spin in a controlled path rather than a free spin the rider chooses.

Who Built the X2 Trains After the 2008 Overhaul?

S&S Worldwide, also listed in filings as S&S Power and S&S Arrow, built the third-generation trains that replaced Arrow’s originals. Each vehicle was cut by about 1,700 pounds to reduce wear, and the mechanical restraints that had jammed were swapped for an air-released system. S&S is a named defendant in the July complaints and paid a confidential sum in the Hawley death case without admitting the ride was defective.

What Did the Medical Examiner Rule in the Hawley Death?

The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner ruled Christopher Hawley’s death an accident caused by blunt head trauma sustained in a park ride accident, according to the family’s case and to Dordick Law’s summary of the coroner’s finding. He was 22. He died the day after the June 23, 2022, ride, following an emergency right frontotemporoparietal craniotomy. The later settlements included no finding of a design defect.

Did California Inspect X2 After the 2022 Death?

Yes. After Hawley died, Cal/OSHA looked at the restraints and head padding, and Six Flags gave the division acceleration data that the company said remained inside the state’s amusement-ride standards. The ride was allowed to reopen. A separate Cal/OSHA inspection of the July 5, 2026, Guillen incident was still open in August, Gómez said, with no public findings released before the park retired the coaster.

Which Other Parks Still Run This 4D Design?

Fuji-Q Highland in Japan still runs Eejanaika, which opened in 2006 and stands about 250 feet. China Dinosaurs Park still runs Dinoconda, which opened in 2012. They are the only two full-size sister machines to X2. Intamin’s smaller ZacSpin layout is a different 4D product and is not the Arrow four-rail system at issue in the Magic Mountain cases.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of public statements, court filings, and ride records. It is for information only and is not legal advice, medical advice, or a finding that X2 caused any injury. Readers who think they were hurt on a ride should speak with a licensed physician about symptoms and with a qualified personal-injury attorney about any claim, including deadlines under California law. Figures, case counts, medical statuses, and the Cal/OSHA inspection described here come from the cited filings and statements and may change as the suits and the state review move forward.