Ян Лифт: История проблемного производителя подъемников

US based ski lift manufacturer

Yan Lift, incorporated as Lift Engineering & Mfg. Co., was a major ski lift manufacturer in North America. Founded in 1965 and based in Carson City, Nevada, the company built at least 200 fixed grip chairlifts, as well as 31 high speed quads. The company's lifts have been involved in the deaths of five people and the injury of at least 70, the worst record of any ski lift maker operating in North America. The firm came under scrutiny by state safety officials after a fatal incident in 1985. After a series of equipment failures, Yan Lifts were outlawed in certain states including California and Colorado. The company later filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996 after multiple other incidents resulting in 3 deaths. Eventually, Yan Lifts manufactured new track and cables for the Angels Flight funicular, but the company, now called YanTrak, went out of business in 2001 after a major accident. The last detachable chairlift made fully designed and built by Yan, La Roca, located at Espot Esquí, closed in 2019 after failure leading to one of the chairs falling off the line occurred. Only one Lift Engineering Detachable remains, found at the Nazhvan Forest Park in Iran.

Lift Engineering was founded by Janek Kunczynski, a Polish immigrant and former ski racer who initially worked at Poma. He left Poma in 1965 and founded the company Lift Engineering to build his own ski lifts. One of his first customers was Squaw Valley. The name "Yan" is the English spelling of his first name, and the brand under which Kunczynski sold his lifts. The company grew through the 1970s and 1980s. Kunczynski was known for dining with prospective clients (après ski) instead of just simple negotiating, and would sketch plans out on paper napkins. Another attractive feature to buyers was the price. Kunczynski sold his lifts at prices well below those of larger manufacturers. Kunczynski is also credited with being the first manufacturer of ski lifts to incorporate aesthetics into the design of his equipment, creating sleek designs that were popular with ski resorts. The company is most noted for designing fixed grip chairlifts. Kunczynski created a standard system that was intended to be simple to operate and maintain. For example, Yan operator booths contain only two switches: a switch that stops and starts the lift, and one that selects its speed. The main controls were placed in a separate machine room. Lift Engineering was the first company to design and build its own low voltage DC motor control tailored specifically to the ski lift industry (System 4200 and later Base 10). Yan's tower designs were also overbuilt, meaning that it was possible to turn a triple chair into a fixed quad just by changing the chairs.

Lift Engineering entered a new market of high speed detachable chairlifts in the 1980s. Whereas other ski lift firms spent as much as four years developing these lifts, Yan installed its first after only one year of research and development, at June Mountain in California. By the late 1980s, Lift Engineering was one of the largest suppliers of ski lifts based in North America. Lift Engineering also was an important player in the funitel market in the late 1980s. The quad mono cable, or QMC, was invented by Kunczynski (US Patent 4,848,241). The lift consisted of four separate loops of cable, strung between the upper and lower stations. Two cables were run in the uphill direction, and two were run in the downhill direction. The cabins would be mounted between the cables. But, because the cables were looped, once the cabins reached the upper station, the cables would loop back downhill not carrying a load. Only one of these lifts was ever built, and first opened to the public in 1988 at June Mountain. The owners allegedly had difficulty getting the cables to run in synchronicity. The lift also developed the same grip problems that occurred on the Yan high speed quads, and ceased operation in 1996.

Despite questions about safety, Yan managed to sell a total of 31 high speed quads in the United States and Canada. Many of the lifts have since been retrofitted by companies such as Poma and Doppelmayr. A controversial figure, Yanek Kunczynksi was a Polish immigrant and figurehead of the company. He brought experience from French chair lift making company, Poma to his American company: Lift Engineering. He was known for taking away what he deemed as unnecessary parts and substituting certain equipment for others, examples of this include replacing aluminum towers for steel ones and swapping rubber rings for steel coils. Faulty welding would be blamed for the accident. Two people were killed and 47 injured. The Teller lift, and its twin lift, Santiago, were two triple chairlifts constructed in 1984 as part of Keystone's North Peak expansion. Teller was rebuilt by Yan and renamed the Ruby lift, free of charge. Santiago was replaced by a Doppelmayr high speed quad in 1998 and relocated to Big Sky, Montana, while Ruby was replaced by a Poma high speed six pack in 2000. During the late 1980s, the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board began to question the safety of Yan's lifts. They learned that Kunczynski, in his drive to build affordable ski lifts, regularly sent steel parts to be welded together in ski area parking lots. The accident occurred when the emergency stop was used repeatedly. A chair started sliding downhill and struck the next chair which got stuck on a tower. This continued several times before a total of four chairs fell. The main problems with the Yan high speed lifts were the chair grips. These were designed so that in order to stay connected to the cable, the chair had to be subject to gravity. The Yan grips, unlike most operating today, did not have high tension coil springs, but rather rubber "marshmallow" springs that exerted much less force on the cable. The repeated emergency brake application was enough to shake the chairs free of the cable. The majority of government safety inspectors failed to detect these problems. The Quicksilver chairlift, which served the Whistler Creekside base area, was replaced by the Creekside Gondola in 1997, built by Poma.

Following the accident at Whistler, and reports of grip slipping at a plethora of other mountains, 15 resorts spent millions of dollars either upgrading, or completely replacing their combined 31 detachable quads in the United States and Canada. and Sun Valley who had 7 Yan High Speed Quads. In 2019, the second last Yan high speed quad La Roca, located at Espot Esqui in Spain, suffered a catastrophic failure leading to one of the chairs falling off the line. This chairlift had Type 7 grips and the original terminals with replaced chairs. As a result of this, the lift was shut down. On December 6, 2019, Espot opened their new La Roca high speed quad, built by Leitner. The last Yan detachable lift remaining is in Iran and uses the POL X West grips. There are still many fixed grip lifts around the U. S. and Canada that are made by Yan, with one more in Val D'Isere, France(The Mont Blanc triple). At one time, Val D'Isere had an entire fleet of Yan chairlifts.