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Tel: +44 (0)20 8051 4542
Independent study
Piston Peak National Park is the Cars-themed land now being built at Magic Kingdom. Working only from public announcements, permit filings and aerial photography, we used Schedule Studio to build a 1,335-activity schedule, checked it against fourteen months of observed progress, and forecast it with nPlan's model, trained on more than 750,000 real construction schedules. The 45-page study sets out what that forecast shows and what would need to change for the land to open on time.
Modelled opening
date in nPlan's reconstructed schedule
if the modelled plan runs as it stands
On-time chance
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Schedule Studio generated the schedule from a scope brief and expanded it into full detail, a planner calibrated it, and Insights produced the first forecast. As fourteen months of progress showed up in aerial photography, we updated it with actual dates, re-ran the model and stress-tested the result against six scenarios, with no part of the chain drawn by hand.
1
Disney's announcements define the scope, water management permits set the target for primary infrastructure, and month-by-month aerial photography gives observed dates for demolition, the river channel, the retaining wall and fill.
2
The schedule runs to eight phases, 104 WBS nodes, 1,335 activities and 1,678 logic links with no open ends. It includes six explicit weather allowances where Florida's wet and hurricane seasons fall on the critical path.
3
Each milestone has 5,000 simulated outcomes from a model trained on more than 750,000 real construction schedules, giving P10, P50, P80 and P90 dates for all fifteen.
4
Two milestones have already been reached. Both landed inside the forecast's P10 to P90 range, and in each case the P50 sat closer to the actual date than the plan did.
347 days
P50 behind the modelled opening
Our reconstructed schedule targets 14 March 2030, but projected forward from progress to 30 September 2026 with no intervention, it reaches a P50 of 24 February 2031 and a P80 of 27 June 2031. That makes the 2029 opening repeated on fan sites very unlikely, and even the strongest structural scenario in the study only brings the P50 forward to the second half of 2030.
224 days
of delay in testing and certification
Before any progress was recorded, the forecast put opening 424 days behind the plan at P50. Fourteen months of actual progress has brought that down to 347 days, though the pattern is the same as on day one, when the civils accounted for 48 days, the terrain course and rockwork mountain for 152, and ride testing, show integration and certification for 224 across 21 planned months.
20 months
cut needed from the ride programme
Four packages carry the critical path with zero float, while the land theming, infrastructure, family ride and guest buildings have between 430 and 1,000 working days to spare. One chain is always critical, so what matters is the size of the gap, which comes from how we calibrated a first-of-a-kind attraction. The finding holds unless Disney's ride programme is around twenty months shorter than ours, and if it holds, a phased opening is the only way to reach 2029 without beating the plan.
2 of 2
milestones where the P50 beat the plan
In our schedule, enabling works and demolition were due to finish on 4 November 2025. The forecast put the P50 at 20 November, within a P10 to P90 range of 7 November to 12 December, and the island was cleared around 14 November. For earthworks and civils, the scheduled date was 24 April 2026 against a P50 of 12 June and a range of 13 May to 30 July, and the retaining wall was finished around 17 July. Across the two milestones, the scheduled dates landed ten days and twelve weeks before the outcome, while the P50 missed by six days and five weeks. Two data points are consistent with the model, and the study is careful to treat them as an early signal.
Nov 2026
date of the first checkpoint
The study ends with a recovery programme of eight interventions, each with an owner, a size in weeks and a date after which it stops being worth doing. It also lists fifteen questions the public record cannot answer and ten checkpoints to watch over the next three years, each with a P80 red line. The first comes in a few weeks, when the November 2026 aerials should show whether the first section of the mountain climb reads as finished rock.
We built everything on this page in a few days, working only from public information. With your own P6 or Microsoft Project schedule, the forecast, scenarios and checkpoints update every time you report progress, so your team can see where the risk sits while there's still time to act. If you'd like to see it on one of your projects, talk to us.
This study was produced without any involvement from, data from, or endorsement by The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney Imagineering or their contractors. Every input is drawn from public announcements, public permit filings and published aerial photography. Dates, durations and logic are nPlan's own estimates and should be read as an outside view, not as a representation of Disney's programme. Cars, Piston Peak and related names are trademarks of their owners and are used here only to identify the subject of the study.
© 2024 nPlan Limited. All Rights Reserved.
HQ: Second Home Spitalfields, NPLAN LIMITED, 68-80 Hanbury Street, London, E1 5JL
Tel: +44 (0)20 8051 4542