Disney World Strands Passengers in the Sky for Hours After New Skyline Gondolas Stall

Several Walt Disney World visitors were stranded in the new Disney Skyliner gondolas Saturday [...]

By Daniel S. Levine

Several Walt Disney World visitors were stranded in the new Disney Skyliner gondolas Saturday night for three hours, trapping them almost 60 feet in the air while waiting to be rescued. The incident was captured on social media, with some posts appearing to show cars colliding at the Disney's Riviera Resort station, although Disney said none of the cars collided. The gondola system, which was only open for a week, has since been closed indefinitely.

Disney World firefighters received to help visitors stuck in the air at 8:27 p.m. Saturday, reports the Orlando Sentinel. Union secretary Tyan O'Reilly said six cars were evacuated and it required "all of the available manpower or most of the available manpower." Back-up assistance came from the Orange and Osceola county sheriff's departments.

O'Reilly noted that Disney's Reedy Creek fire department only has 27 personnel, adding, "If anything else would have been going on [at Disney] at that moment, it could have been catastrophic."

No one was injured in the incident.

"It may have been a different story if that thing broke out down at noon," O'Reilly added.

It is still not known what caused the outage and Disney has not set a timeline for re-opening the gondolas.

"One of the three Disney Skyliner routes experienced an unexpected downtime Saturday evening," Disney said in a statement to Click Orlando. "As a result, the Skyliner will be closed while we look into the details surrounding this downtime. We apologize for this situation, and we are working with each guest individually regarding impacts to their visit with us."

"It was definitely an adventure," Jeff Perera, who was stuck on one of the Skyliner cars with his wife and four children, told the Sentinel. "We tried to keep it light."

The family was alone in their car, so they sang songs from Frozen loud enough so others trapped nearby could hear them.

While the experience was not too bad for the Pereras, Lindsey Nassir told Click Orlando it was a "nightmare" for her family. They were stuck in a car for almost four hours after leaving EPCOT. Nassir said the car did not have any air conditioning.

"That's a sweat box. That up there, had it been in the middle of the day, health problems, children, I can't even imagine what would have happened had it been 100 degrees outside that day and then in a box with eight people," she said.

"Disney handled the situation well, given the circumstances," Courtney Cole another passenger who was stranded, told CNN. "Accidents happen... I'm not blaming anyone."

The Disney Skyliner system takes guests to EPCOT and Disney's Hollywood Studios, with stops at the Caribbean Beach, Riviera, Art of Animation and Pop Century resorts. There have been plans for expanding the system to Animal Kingdom and other resorts.

The cars move at 11 mph and no more than 10 people are allowed in at a time.

Photo credit: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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