A great ride: Holiday World celebrates 60 years.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: AROUND INDIANA

MOST EXECUTIVES DON'T like talk of roller-coaster rides when speaking of business, but Will Koch does.

Koch is president of Koch Development Corp., which owns and operates Holiday World and Splashin' Safari, the growing theme park in the southern Indiana community of Santa Claus. This season, Holiday World debuted its third major roller coaster, a wooden attraction known as The Voyage.

At 1.2 miles, it's the third-longest wooden coaster in existence (behind King's Island's The Beast and Son of Beast). Its maximum speed is 67 mph, and its highest drop is 154 feet. Its three trains pass through five tunnels on their 2-minute, 45-second trip, along with three 90-degree extreme-banked turns. Perhaps most important, it's said to have more "air time"--that feeling of weightlessness over the crests of a coaster's hills--than any other wooden coaster, totaling 24.2 seconds.

The Voyage is earning plenty of new attention for Holiday World. It recently made national TV appearances on ABC, Fox and the National Geographic Channel, and has generated ink in USA Today, Family Fun and other publications

The Voyage maintains Holiday World's focus on wooden coasters rather than the steel varieties that in other parks have risen more than 400 feet and surpassed 100 mph. "We think wooden coasters are a little more family-oriented," Koch says. Keeping that family focus has been a key to the park's...