Bakunawa: Six Flags' New 382-Foot Sea Serpent Is the Most Insane Coaster Ever Built

On July 28, Six Flags Great Adventure unveiled something that made me choke on my coffee. Bakunawa — named after a Philippine sea serpent that eats the moon during eclipses — is a 382-foot spinning floorless coaster that will launch you upside down, and it breaks six world records before the train even returns to the station. Let me tell you why this is the most unhinged thing to come out of Jackson, New Jersey since Kingda Ka.

The Six Records

Here's what Six Flags is claiming, and I want you to sit down before reading this list:

• Tallest spinning coaster: 382 feet. That's taller than the Statue of Liberty. While spinning.
• Fastest spinning coaster: 100 mph. You will be rotating at highway speeds.
• Fastest inversion: The ride's first drop and inversion will clock in faster than any other coaster inversion on the planet.
• Longest stall inversion: You'll hang upside down longer than any other coaster dares to keep you there.
• First floorless spinning coaster: Your feet dangle over nothing while the train corkscrews through the air.
• First upside-down launch: The train launches you into the ride's layout while you're already inverted. Think about that for a second.

Six world records. One ride. And they're not even done — the coaster's 382-foot height puts it among the five tallest coasters in the world, period. It's a spinning coaster that's taller than Fury 325. Let that sink in.

The Floorless Spinning Concept

Here's what's genuinely clever about this. Spinning coasters have existed for years — Maurer Rides and Mack have been doing them for decades. But they've always been relatively compact, family-friendly affairs. Nobody ever thought to strap a spinning track to a 382-foot tower and say "go find out what happens."

The floorless trains are a stroke of twisted genius. On a normal spinning coaster, you have a floor so your feet don't hit things. Bakunawa's designers said "no floor, full send." Your legs dangle freely as the train rotates through the layout. The combination of spinning + floorless + the height creates a sensory experience that literally doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth.

The upside-down launch is the detail that keeps me up at night. The train is held inverted before the launch, meaning you're staring at the ground from 382 feet up, and then — then — the LSM motors fire and you're rocketed forward while still upside down. There is no precedent for this. The engineers at Six Flags and the ride's manufacturer looked at every safety regulation, every established design principle, and said "yeah but what if we launched them upside down though."

Why This Matters

2026 has been a ridiculous year for coasters. We've got giga dive coasters, 300-foot spike towers, and Mack extreme spinners that redefine what a coaster can do. But Bakunawa represents something different: it's the first time a major park has taken a "novelty" coaster type — the spinning coaster — and scaled it up to world-record territory.

This isn't just another strata coaster trying to be the tallest. The spinning mechanism fundamentally changes the ride experience. Every rider gets a different ride because the rotation is uncontrolled — it's driven by physics, by weight distribution, by which direction the wind is blowing. Bakunawa is a different coaster every time you ride it. That's a genuinely new thing in the world of mega-coasters, where every ride on Fury 325 or Steel Vengeance is mechanically identical.

Six Flags has been on a heater lately. They've been investing in quality over quantity, and Bakunawa is the crown jewel of that strategy. A world-record ride that's actually innovative, not just taller. A floorless spinning coaster that launches upside down. A 382-foot sea serpent that eats the moon.

I cannot wait to wait four hours in line for this thing.