May 20, 2007

The Singapore Flyer

Over the past few months, a huge ferris wheel has been built near the Marina Bay section of Singapore. This behemoth, when finished, will be the largest ferris wheel in the world at 165 meters tall (the London Eye is 135m, and the Star of Nanchang is 162m), with a diameter of 150 meters. The Flyer had principal construction of the wheel finished a few weeks ago; however, since then, three of the internal spokes have been removed (I don't know why), although the outer rim remains whole and intact.

The Flyer, which is scheduled to begin operations on 1 March 2008, is expected to cost a total of S$240 million; the basic ticket price will be S$29.50 per adult for a 37-minute ride. (More information on the Singapore Flyer can be found here.)

All of the below pictures were taken by me with my hand phone camera while I was riding to work on various speeding taxis. :) Each of the photos were taken about one week apart. Unfortunately, as I was cropping these photos, they lost a lot of detail and so the sky in particular has become rather smudgy. However, they still give a decent idea as to how progress on the Flyer has progressed over time.













2 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice sequence of photos! btw, those spokes are temporary and are meant to be removed once the cables are probably tensioned.

JDsg said...

Thanks! Yeah, I was very much getting that impression this morning when (while riding in a taxi yet again) I saw that a fourth spoke had been removed. I think you're right, they're only temporary, but I also think I'd rather have them there when I ride the thing next year, insha'allah. :)

BTW, welcome to the readers of The Intelligent Singaporean and SingaporeSurf. I do appreciate the links!