I want to be as upfront about this as possible, this is a video that poses a question without
an answer… not yet at least.
If you’ve read any number of Disney books or been on a tour or watched any of the theme
park channels out there, you may have come across this fun fact: Disney built Cinderella
Castle, The Tower of Terror, and Expedition Everest in Walt Disney World with a height
of under 200 feet to intentionally avoid having to place a blinking light at the top.
Per FAA regulations, structures over that height need such a light for any low flying
aircraft that might be in the area.
The Dolphin Resort at Disney World is over 250 feet tall… so where’s the light?
This was a question submitted by subscriber Malachi Buddydoll and it admittedly
caught me off guard.
I knew about the 200 foot rule in relation to the theme park icons, but I had never thought
about the height of the Dolphin resort.
So I decided to try and find an answer.
The first step, as silly as it may sound, was to make sure there actually wasn’t a
light on the Dolphin resort.
I didn’t remember seeing one, but I needed more than that.
I checked everything from my own footage of the building at night to other people’s
footage of it at night to photos of it to Google Map satellite photos.
No signs of any light.
I took it step further and started digging through the FAA’s DOF.
DOF stands of Digital Obstacle File.
It’s a massive public list of all of the FAA’s registered obstacles in the United States.
It even includes some structures under 200 feet that don’t have lights.
I checked all of the entries listed for both Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista and there was
no sign of the Dolphin.
The next question I had to ask myself was whether or not the fact about the lights was even true.
Do structures over 200 feet need a light?
Maybe they didn’t, and the whole Castle/Everest tidbit was a lie.
So I started reading through the Advisory Circular 70/7460-1L document (fun reading) which, according
to the FAA, describes the standards for marking and lighting structures such as buildings.
Sure enough Chapter 2.1, Structures to be Marked and Lighted, states that any temporary
or permanent structure that exceeds an overall height of 200 feet above ground level should
be marked and/or lighted.
OK.
So we know there isn’t a light on the building, and we know it should have one.
So why doesn’t it?
I proposed the question on Twitter and got a number of theories.
One suggested that the FAA regulation wasn’t around when it was built, but that isn’t the case.
In fact it's been around longer than that and it's why Disney kept Cinderella Castle under 200ft back in 1971.
Someone suggested that it wasn’t needed because Disney is a no-fly zone.
It can’t be this either.
For one, Disney became a no-fly zone in 2001, 11 years after the Dolphin opened and that
no-fly zone doesn’t apply to their entire property.
On top of that Disney actually had a structure over 200 feet and even after the no-fly zone
was established it maintained a flashing red light.
It was the wand attached to Spaceship Earth that went up in 1999 and remained there until 2007.
In fact, unlike the Dolphin resort, that wand is in the FAA’s digital obstacle file, which
also maintains the status of dismantled obstacles.
I even checked the FAA’s public archives of obstruction evaluation cases.
I was able to find everything from the Tower of Terror to cell phone towers to the temporary
cranes brought in to build the new Coronado Resort building.
But no Swan or Dolphin.
I reached out to Disney about this and predictable since they don’t own the Dolphin they didn’t
have an answer for me.
I reached out to the Dolphin, but wasn’t able to get an answer from them as well.
At least not from anyone I was able to get on the phone.
But Rob, who cares?
Does it really matter?
I’ll admit a large part of my digging around was this snowballing effect of just wanting to know why.
However the other reason for looking into it was the thought that if the Dolphin was
for some reason exempt from this regulation, which seems to be the case, doesn’t it mean
under the right conditions structures inside the parks could be as well?
Could we see a day where the parks feature an attraction that’s well over 200 feet
without an immersion breaking light on top of it?
Could the Dolphin be the key to making that happen?
Like I said, I don’t have an answer right now but I’m not done looking into it.
I’d have a hard time believing that it just went unnoticed for thirty years, so there
must be a regulation or exception somewhere.
So stay tuned for the exciting conclusion- OK let’s be real, the boring bureaucratic
conclusion to the Case of the Missing Dolphin Light.