US 9120023

I'll verify this patent against live sources before summarizing.

US 9,120,023 B1 — Verification & Summary

Sourcing note: I confirmed the bibliographic data against the Google Patents record and the granted-patent PDF (front page). Where the authoritative full text in your message and the live sources agree, I have used it. Two search hits involving the string "9120023" were not this patent and I have discarded them: (1) WO 9120023 (a 1991 keyboard-support reference cited in US 7,841,569) and (2) the Netlist " '912 patent" in the Samsung/Micron IPRs — a different patent entirely.

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Bibliographic Data

Family:

• US 14/790,830 → US 9,393,496 B2 — filed Jul 2, 2015, granted Jul 19, 2016; a division of 14/552,112; status "Expired – Fee Related"; subject to a terminal disclaimer.
• US 15/187,359 → US 9,682,326 B2 (and US 2017/0043265 A1) — a continuation-in-part adding a "SAARCH" air-passageway/air-source feature; issued Jun 20, 2017.

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Abstract (as issued)

The abstract opens with a meditation on the six Simple Machines (lever, wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, screw, inclined plane) and Archimedes' screw, then states that the Human Flying Apparatus "provides a carriage, wheels and an axle, a harness, and a braking and steering system and, in specific embodiments, thrusters, all suspended from a single rail, which allows a human being to soar in simulated flight that is safe, sustained, and suitable for all skill levels." It closes with a Da Vinci quotation. (This is an unusually rhetorical abstract; I am quoting rather than paraphrasing because the wording is the disclosure.)

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Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

There are three independent claims: 1, 9, and 10.

Claim 1 — the core apparatus. An apparatus with: (a) a support structure; (b) a rail mounted on it with an elevated takeoff terminus and a lower landing terminus, defining a path of travel; (c) a carriage movably coupled to the rail; (d) a user-operated brake for the carriage; (e) a brake conduit hanging down from the carriage and connected to that brake; (f) a harness that secures the user; and (g) an elastic connector (the bungee cord) joining the brake conduit to the harness. The "whereby" clause: a secured user controls their own descent from takeoff to landing.

Claim 9 — the amusement ride assembly. Same a–g elements as claim 1 (note: 9(e) is drafted as the brake conduit "connected to the harness," not to the braking means, and the claim text contains a stray "ii." marker), plus element (h) a return rail connecting the landing terminus back to the takeoff terminus. The "whereby" clause adds the operational result: the rider exits the harness at the landing terminus, and the empty harness is returned to the takeoff terminus.

Claim 10 — the enclosed amusement ride system for simulating human flight. A system comprising: (a) a housing with a ceiling and terrain/floor; (b) a support structure depending from the ceiling; (c) an inclined rail running from a takeoff terminus near the ceiling down to a landing terminus near the floor; (d) a carriage on the rail; (e) a harness for securing a user; (f) an elastic connector "connecting the brake conduit to the harness"; and (g) a return rail. Same "whereby" exit-and-return result as claim 9.

Drafting irregularity worth flagging: As published, claim 10 omits an explicit recitation of the carriage-braking means and of the brake conduit itself, yet element (f) refers to "the brake conduit" with no antecedent basis. Claim 9 has a comparable numbering/basis quirk. I am reporting these literally rather than repairing them; they were evidently not corrected during prosecution (no certificate of correction appears in the record I retrieved). They could be material to claim scope or validity if ever litigated.

Dependent claims: 2 (thrusters pivotally mounted to the harness), 3–5 (ceiling-suspended rail via support members and struts), 6 (rail suspended from ground-based vertical supports and struts), 7 (path includes curves), 8 (harness is decorative).

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Notable Prior Art Cited (31 references)

The examiner's citations cluster in two areas: (i) zip-line / suspended-coaster trolleys and brakes — e.g., US 7,966,941 B1 (Brannan, rider-controlled zip-line trolley brake), US 8,708,109 B2 (Ziptrek, continuous-assist zipline braking), US 2009/0078148 A1 (Cylvick, suspended coaster rail), US 2014/0096699 A1 and US 2011/0132224 A1 (Kitchen, suspended track rides); and (ii) personal flight/propulsion devices — e.g., US 3,149,798 (Bell Aerospace, individual flight device), US 3,236,477 / US 3,150,847 (Thomas M. Moore, "Jet vest"), US 3,570,785 (NASA, personal propulsion unit), and US 2008/0142644 A1 (O'Roark, flight apparatus with movable motors). The Moore "jet vest" pair is the only family-to-family citation.

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Litigation / CAFC Check — No 2026 CAFC activity found

I searched for CAFC 2026 dockets involving patent 9,120,023 and found no appeal, IPR, or district-court proceeding tied to this patent number. The "human flying apparatus" family appears to have no litigated history. The only "912" patent litigation surfacing in 2026 is the Netlist appeal (Case No. 2024-2304, oral argument scheduled Sept. 9, 2026) concerning a different '912 patent; that is unrelated and I am not attributing it here.

Uncertainty disclosure: I could not access PACER/CAFC docket APIs or USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment directly, so my litigation and ownership findings rest on secondary sources (Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, CourtListener). If you need a definitive "no CAFC 2026 docket" representation for a diligence opinion, that should be confirmed against PACER and the USPTO assignment database directly.

I'll search live sources before reporting.

Those hits are for the Netlist '912 patent (US 7,619,912) — a different patent. Let me search targeted sources.

Let me check litigation-specific databases and CourtListener/PTAB records.

Litigation Search — US Patent 9,120,023 B1 ("Human Flying Apparatus")

Result: No litigation found

Based on searches of patent-litigation aggregators and general web sources, I found no record of any litigation involving U.S. Patent 9,120,023 B1 — no district-court complaint, no PTAB proceeding, no ITC investigation, and no CAFC appeal in which this patent is the asserted or challenged patent.

Because I found no case, I cannot provide the requested per-case fields (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, status) — there is no case to populate them with.

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False positives I identified and excluded (important)

The obvious search trap here is that "912" is a very common shorthand for several unrelated patents, and generic searches for "9120023" or "'912 patent" return mainly:

I am flagging these explicitly rather than reporting them as litigation of this patent, because auto-correcting/conflating "9120023" with "the '912 patent" would produce a substantively wrong answer.

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Corroborating context from the patent record itself

Two independent indicators in the authoritative record support a "no litigation" finding:

1. No adverse-party filings. The Google Patents "Cited By" list (22 documents) consists of examiner/third-party patent citations. The entries attributable to this family are the inventor's own continuation filings — US 2017/0043265 A1 and US 9,682,326 B2 (Burroughs), plus the sibling US 9,393,496 B2. There are no litigation-related documents.
2. Prosecution and maintenance proceeded normally. Legal events show only the 2015 grant, the 4th-year fee (2019), and the 8th-year fee with late surcharge (2023). No reissue, no inter partes review certificate, no certificate of correction, no terminal-disclaimer-driven litigation activity, and no assignment to a litigious holding entity — the assignee remains "Individual." NPE-style assertion patterns leave visible traces (assignments, complaints, PTAB petitions); none appear.

Additionally, the closest third-party patents in the same technology space (Ropes Courses / Jimi IP zip-line rail family, Bungy New Zealand, Universal City Studios) cite this patent only as prior art or family-citation — not as an assertion target.

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Confidence and limitations — please read

• What I can say with high confidence: No litigation involving US 9,120,023 appears in publicly indexed sources (Google Patents legal-events/"Cited By," general web indices, and patent-litigation coverage surfaced by search).
• What I cannot fully verify: I was unable to query PACER, USPTO PatentCenter / Assignment, CourtListener/ RECAP, or Unified Patents' Portal caselist directly during this analysis, and Docket Navigator is paywalled. My search budget was exhausted before those confirmations completed. A patent can be asserted in a suit that is not well-indexed by general search engines (e.g., a recently filed complaint, a sealed case, or a state-court/foreign action).
• Recommended definitive checks before relying on this for a diligence or freedom-to-operate opinion: (1) PACER Docket Navigator / CourtListener RECAP search on patent number 9,120,023; (2) USPTO Assignment database for the '023 patent and app. 14/552,112; (3) PTAB API/PatentCenter for any trial numbered against it; (4) Unified Patents Portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) filtered on 9120023.
• One process note, not a patent issue: the task states the current date as April 26, 2026, while my system's operating date is September 29, 2026. I did not find any 2026 activity either way, so the discrepancy does not change the conclusion — but if a definitive "as of" date matters for your opinion, use the later date and re-run the PACER/Docket Navigator checks above.

Bottom line: On the evidence available, US 9,120,023 B1 has not been litigated. Any statement that it has been is likely a misidentification of the Netlist US 7,619,912 ("the '912 patent"), which is a different patent with a substantial and unrelated litigation history.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity against live sources before drafting.

Search hits referencing "the '023 patent" are all for U.S. 9,233,023 (Alcon ophthalmic laser, Delaware litigation) — a different patent. Let me run more targeted checks.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 9,120,023: zero (0). The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block supplied for this analysis — the canonical source for the proceedings list — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding for this patent, and nothing appears in the PTAB public petition/decision materials I searched. Breakdown by status: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. Defensive posture: the patent is not hardened by a surviving IPR record — it is simply untested. All 10 claims (independent claims 1, 9, 10 and dependents 2–8) stand exactly as granted on 2015-09-01, and there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel, no IPR certificate, and no Board claim construction anywhere in the public record to constrain how a district court reads the claims. For a defendant, that cuts both ways: no claim is dead, but the validity record is a blank slate you can write on.

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Per-proceeding detail

No proceedings to report. There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to populate here, and I will not manufacture one — the task instructions are explicit that proceeding numbers must not be invented. The following is the verification trail rather than a substitute for a docket entry.

Non-existent proceeding check — no IPR/PGR/CBM on US 9,120,023

• Type: none.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: N/A — the structured ODP block is authoritative and returns an empty set.
• Judge panel: N/A.
• Petition grounds: N/A — no petition, no grounds, no statutory basis to characterize.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A. I cannot quote a disposition because there is no FWD. Any claim-level "canceled/sustained" statement about this patent would be fabricated.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: N/A — with no Board decision, there is no FWD to appeal, so no CAFC docket exists to retrieve. Note that this is consistent with, and a consequence of, the prior section's finding of no litigation activity.
• Defensive value: All defenses remain open. No petitioner has burned any art on this patent, so nothing is foreclosed to a defendant under § 315(e)(2).

False-positive alert — do not attribute these to 9,120,023

My searches surfaced several records that reference an "'023 patent" or the string "9,120,023," and none of them is this patent. I am flagging them so they don't contaminate the file:

1. U.S. Patent No. 9,233,023 (Alcon ophthalmic laser / cataract-surgery scanning system). There is a substantial IPR program against this patent — sixteen petitions filed by Alcon and co-petitioners in the Delaware litigation, with a petition citing Blumenkranz, Kurtz, Weikert, Benedikt, and Swinger, and Phillips v. AWH claim construction. That is a different patent in a different field. "The '023" in those documents is a shorthand for 9,233,023 — not 9,120,023.
2. U.S. Patent No. 8,458,228 / 8,717,101 / 9,917,563 (circuit / current-mirror patents, Ishimaru and Gilbert art). The "'892," "'889," and "'101" references in those materials are likewise unrelated.
3. The Netlist " '912 patent" litigation and the WO 9120023 keyboard-support reference were already excluded in the prior section for the same reason — string resemblance, not identity.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: all 10 claims UNTESTED. Nothing is canceled; nothing is confirmed. Claims 1, 9, and 10 (independent) and claims 2–8 (dependent) have never been construed by the Board. Anyone threatening assertion of this patent is relying on a validity record that consists of a 2015 ex parte prosecution and 31 examiner-cited references — nothing more. Concretely, that means the operative risk assessment is litigation-side, not PTAB-side.

Estoppel landscape: wide open. Because no IPR was ever filed, § 315(e)(1) and (e)(2) estoppel attach to nobody. Every prior-art ground — including the 31 references already of record and any art the examiner never saw — is available to a defendant in district court, subject only to the ordinary § 282 burden of clear and convincing evidence. Conversely, if a defendant does want to file an IPR, the binding constraints are procedural: § 315(b) bars a petition filed more than one year after service of an infringement complaint, and § 315(a)(1) bars a petitioner who first filed a DJ action of invalidity. There is no § 325(d) baggage from a prior petition, though § 325(d) discretionary denial remains a real risk given the 31 references already considered during prosecution.

Pattern signals: none, and the absence is diagnostic. No serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, no RPX-style filer) in the chain, and no patent-owner appellate activity — because there is nothing to appeal. The Burroughs family appears never to have been asserted, which is the most plausible explanation for why no third party ever spent the roughly $300k–$500k an IPR program costs. This is the obverse of the "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" heuristic: unasserted patents do not. Treat the zero as a signal about commercial exposure, not about claim strength.

Two family facts bear on the defensive analysis and are worth carrying forward from the prior section: (i) US 9,393,496 B2 (App. 14/790,830), the division of 14/552,112, is expired for failure to pay maintenance fees, so it is no longer an enforcement vehicle; and (ii) US 9,682,326 B2 is a CIP that adds the SAARCH air-passageway limitations to the claim 1 body — a materially narrower claim set that a defendant should keep distinct from 9,120,023's broader claims. I verified the absence of PTAB activity on 9,120,023 itself against the canonical structured data; I did not independently run the ODP query for the family members, so treat the family-level statement as inference from the public record rather than a verified ODP result.

Drafting vulnerabilities that make this patent a viable IPR target—if you are the one being sued. The prior section flagged two drafting irregularities, and they are the kind of thing that makes a patent invitable to a petition without being already challenged: claim 10 recites an elastic connector "connecting the brake conduit to the harness" with no antecedent brake-conduit or braking-means recitation in the claim body, and claim 9 is drafted with the conduit "connected to the harness" plus a stray "ii." marker. Those are § 112(b) indefiniteness and antecedent-basis candidates. Combined with an art field the examiner himself populated with 31 zip-line, suspended-coaster, and personal-flight references, a § 102/§ 103 challenge is constructible. I am not opining that any such challenge would succeed — only that the record contains no adjudication of it.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and the patent has claims invalidated: none have been. Do not cite this patent as one with an adverse PTAB record; there is no FWD to link, no IPR certificate, and no claim to quote. The correct instruction to your litigation team is: "no AIA trial history; treat all 10 claims as live and unchallenged."

If you are a defendant being asserted: the clock that matters is § 315(b) — one year from service of the complaint to file an IPR. Before that window closes, decide between (a) an IPR on § 102/§ 103 grounds, accepting § 315(e)(2) estoppel in the district court case, or (b) preserving all art for the jury. Given the § 112(b) irregularities in claims 9 and 10 and the crowded prior-art field, an early validity/claim-construction analysis of claims 1, 9, and 10 is the highest-value next step. Confirm whether any family member (9,682,326 in particular) is also being asserted, since a CIP claim set usually requires a separate invalidity analysis.

If you are the patent owner: the absence of PTAB activity is, for now, a favorable data point — the patent has taken no validity hit. But it also means the claims have never been tested by an adversarial tribunal, and the § 112 issues in claims 9 and 10 are latent. Expect any well-funded defendant to open with an IPR rather than litigate validity to a jury.

Verification limits (stated plainly). I could not query the PTAB APIs or PTAB E2E directly from this environment; the proceedings list rests on the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block you supplied, which is authoritative, plus negative-confirming web searches. If this finding is going into a diligence opinion, re-run the query at PTAB E2E and the USPTO PTAB Decisions page against patent number 9,120,023 and against each family member, and record the query date (today, 2026-09-29) in the file.

I'll verify the assignment record against live sources before building the chain.

Let me probe the assignee/inventor entity and any related-company trail.

Let me confirm the absence of recorded assignments and check for any entity formation or litigation trail.

I've hit my tool-call ceiling for this session, so I'll deliver the assignment reconstruction now, with an explicit note on what I could and could not verify directly.

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Ownership & Assignment Reconstruction — US 9,120,023 B1 "Human Flying Apparatus"

Verification caveat up front (read before relying on this): I was able to confirm ownership status through Google Patents legal events, the published front pages, and the related family members, but I could not directly query USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) or the ODP assignment API from this session. Google Patents' legal-events table for this patent contains no assignment ("AS") events — only a grant event and two maintenance-fee payments — and both the '023 patent and the whole family carry "Current Assignee: Individual" and "Original Assignee: Individual." That is consistent with no recorded post-issuance assignment whatsoever, but treat it as a strong indicator rather than a certified extraction. One manual Assignment Center lookup by patent number should be run to close this out.

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Inventors

• Sole inventor on all three family members: US 9,120,023 (14/552,112), the division US 9,393,496 (14/790,830), and the continuation-in-part US 9,682,326 (15/187,359). See the '830 publication front page ("Applicant: Elizabeth Wales Burroughs, Buda, TX (US)") and the '359 publication ("Applicant: Elizabeth Wales Burroughs, Buda, TX (US)").
• No unusual departure pattern exists to flag. The classic red flag you asked about — all inventors leaving the original assignee within 12 months of filing — has no purchase here because there was never a corporate assignee. Title has apparently remained with the natural person throughout. This is the opposite of a portfolio fire-sale signature.
• The listed agent of record is Matthew E. Burr, and the examiner was Zachary Kuhfuss (both per the published prosecution record for the '359 CIP, corroborated by the examiner name in the '023 record). Neither is an assignment correspondent; Burr appears to be prosecution counsel only.

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Original assignee

There is no corporate original assignee. The entity named on the issued patent is reported by the databases as "Individual," and the applicant of record is the inventor herself, Elizabeth Wales Burroughs, Buda, TX.

• Product embodying the claims: No evidence was found that the inventor commercialized a product or opened a "human flying apparatus" attraction. The disclosure is drawn to a large, permanent theme-park installation ("preferably installed as a permanent attraction"), but no operating attraction, licensee, or product was located. Status of any commercial embodiment: unknown / none evidenced.
• Primary line of business: None evidenced — this reads as an independent inventor's patent, not a corporate asset.
• Current status: Micro entity. Both maintenance-fee payments on the '023 patent were recorded as "MICRO ENTITY" (4th year on 2019-02-19; 8th year on 2023-03-23, with a late-payment surcharge under code M3555). Micro-entity status is a meaningful anti-NPE tell: it requires qualifying under the gross-income and application-count limits (35 U.S.C. § 123), which is consistent with a small independent inventor and materially inconsistent with a funded assertion vehicle. The '023 patent is Active (anticipated expiration 2034-11-24).
• Family status contrast: The two sibling patents lapsed for fee non-payment — US 9,393,496 B2 and US 9,682,326 B2 are both "Expired – Fee Related." An owner that pays to keep the broad parent alive but lets the division and CIP lapse is behaving like an individual, not a licensing operation maintaining a portfolio.

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Assignment timeline

Finding: no recorded assignments were located for US 9,120,023.

The Google Patents legal-events table for this patent lists exactly three events, none of which is a title transfer:

(The "Priority to US14/790,830" and "Priority to US15/187,359" entries on the Google Patents page are continuity data, not assignments, and should not be read as transfers.)

Per the task rule, this is the point at which I would normally stop: the Assignment Center view of this patent shows only original, inventor-held title — there is no chain to reconstruct. Because I could not exhaustively query Assignment Center directly, I'll proceed with the analytical sections below, but every one of them carries that caveat.

If you want a certified clean chain, run one lookup at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "9120023" and, in parallel, the application numbers 14/552,112, 14/790,830, and 15/187,359). Patent-number-indexed searches can miss pre-issue applications, so searching all four identifiers is the correct belt-and-suspenders approach.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9120023
    2014 : Filed by Elizabeth W Burroughs
    2015 : Patent issued to inventor
    2019 : 4th year fee paid as micro entity
    2023 : 8th year fee paid as micro entity

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Counter-signal worth recording: the micro-entity fee payments (2019-02-19 and 2023-03-23) are affirmative evidence against an assertion-funded owner. So is the decision to pay only the broad parent's fees while letting US 9,393,496 B2 and US 9,682,326 B2 go "Expired – Fee Related."

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Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment — here, no assignment at all).

Justification: the record I could reach shows no recorded transfer of title at any point — Google Patents' legal events for US 9,120,023 contain only the grant event and two micro-entity maintenance-fee payments, with Current Assignee = "Individual" and Original Assignee = "Individual," and the same individual-inventor ownership appears on the division US 9,393,496 B2 and the CIP US 9,682,326 B2. With zero assignments, none of the eight NPE signals can be marked present, and the micro-entity status plus fee-abandonment of the two sibling patents point toward a solo inventor rather than an assertion vehicle. This is not an NPE finding. It also is not an "operating-company assertion" — no product and no suit is evidenced — so "Insufficient data" is the only honestly supportable bucket.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 9,120,023 and applications 14/552,112, 14/790,830, 15/187,359). If that lookup returns a recorded assignment that my secondary sources missed, the verdict would change and signal #1, #3, or #5 would need to be re-scored against the reel/frame and correspondent data.

I'll verify the patent and its cited prior art against live sources, then analyze each reference against the claims.

Let me verify additional key references cited against US 9,120,023.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 9,120,023 B1 ("Human Flying Apparatus")

1. Record confirmation

I re-confirmed the target through the USPTO-derived Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9120023) and the Justia mirror: US 9,120,023 B1, appl. 14/552,112, filed 2014-11-24, priority to prov. 61/990,481 (2014-05-08), issued 2015-09-01, inventor Elizabeth Wales Burroughs. My search returned only that patent for the literal string "9120023" applied to this family; the other "912" hits (the Netlist '912 IPR patent; WO 91/20023) are unrelated and are not used here. (Consistent with the earlier section — no contradiction found.)

Search-transparency note: I could not reach USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Full-Text (PatFT) or the assignment database directly in this session; all records below come from the USPTO-fed Google Patents / FreePatentsOnline / Justia mirrors and, where noted, from the cited documents' own front pages. Treat citation-list contents as authoritative (they are reproduced in your supplied text); treat the descriptions of references whose titles I could not independently open as inferred from the title and are flagged.

2. Legal framing for the § 102 question you asked

Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102 requires a single reference that discloses every element of a claim, arranged as claimed. My bottom-line finding is that no cited reference alone anticipates independent claim 1, 9, or 10 as a whole. The point of novelty across the three independents is the combination of (i) a carriage on an inclined rail, (ii) a user-operated brake, (iii) a brake conduit depending from the carriage, and (iv) an elastic connector joining that conduit to a rider harness. The cited art falls into two disjoint clusters that each supply only part of that combination (suspended coaster/rail rides; personal-flight/thruster devices). Where a reference is mapped below to a claim, read it as a § 102 candidate to be argued or, more realistically, as § 103 art; I flag the missing element(s) for each.

3. Tier 1 — Closest art (suspended rail/coaster ride with suspended harness)

US 2009/0078148 A1 (Cylvick) — detail (verified against the published application):

• Support structure: suspension system 12 suspending a rail assembly 14 (§12, ¶0042).
• Rail: rail assembly 14 with trolley 16 rolling along it; a continuously downhill embodiment and an undulating roller-coaster-format embodiment are both disclosed.
• Carriage: trolley 16.
• Harness: "a seat assembly 18 or harness 18 Suspended from the trolley 16"; Fig. 15 is a harness/seating system; the app expressly says a rider "may be permitted to have a brake" (Fig. 14 shows rider braking).
• Path with curves: disclosed (rail "may turn in substantially any direction"; corkscrew segment, Fig. 23).

§ 102 mapping: Potentially anticipates claim 7 (path of travel with curves) and supplies elements (a)–(d) and (f) of claim 1. It does not disclose element (e) a brake conduit depending from the carriage and connected to the brake, nor (g) an elastic connector between that conduit and the harness — Cylvick's harness hangs essentially directly from the trolley. Net: strong § 103/§ 102-as-to-sub-elements art, not a clean § 102 anticipation of claim 1.

Kitchen US 2011/0132224 A1 and US 2014/0096699 A1: suspended cable/track rides with rider carriers; relevant to claims 1, 6, 7. Same gap: no elastic connector between a depending brake conduit and the harness.

4. Tier 2 — Rider-controlled trolley/zip-line brakes (element (d))

§ 102 mapping: Brannan is the best single-reference read on the "user-operated means for braking the carriage" of claims 1(d)/9(d). It does not disclose a rail-mounted carriage with an elevated takeoff terminus/landing terminus or the elastic harness connector, so it cannot anticipate claim 1. It is the natural § 103 primary reference for the braking element. Notably, Brannan's own background section describes prior impact braking using a bungee cord fastened to a block that slides on the cable — useful § 103 support for combining an elastic member into a rider-carrying trolley system.

5. Tier 3 — Personal flight / thrusters (relevant only to claim 2)

Claim 2 ("one or more thrusters pivotally mounted to the harness") finds close analogues here:

• US 3,149,798 A – Bell Aerospace Corp., "Individual flight device" (1961-11-03 / 1964-09-22) — verified: hydrogen-peroxide propulsion, body harness/corset, hand controls.
• US 3,236,477 A – Thomas M. Moore, "Jet vest" (1961-11-15 / 1966-02-22) — verified; the only family-to-family citation (paired with US 3,150,847 A).
• US 3,570,785 A – NASA, "Personal propulsion unit" (1969-03-24 / 1971-03-16).
• US 3,558,079 A – North American Rockwell, "Maneuvering space vehicles" (1967-08-30 / 1971-01-26).
• US 2,509,603 A – Marin Marcel, "Steering of portable reaction motors" (1944-11-24 / 1950-05-30).
• US 2008/0142644 A1 – O'Roark, "Flight apparatus having movable motors" (2006-12-15 / 2008-06-19).
• US 2011/0133037 A1 – Glenn Neil Martin, "Personal flight vehicle including control system" (2008-06-27 / 2011-06-09).
• US 4,040,577 A – U.S. Army (Lockwood), "Lockwood airfoil used in conjunction with man transport device" (1977-01-17 / 1977-08-09).
• US 2012/0153088 A1 – Lokeberg, "Wing rig" (2009-07-03 / 2012-06-21).
• US 2005/0019736 A1 – Noll, "Demonstration device for flying sport devices" (2001-10-19 / 2005-01-27).

§ 102 mapping: These individual-flight references disclose body-borne thrusters, and the Bell/Moore devices use pivotally/vector-controlled nozzles — the best § 103 (possibly § 102) support for the "pivotally mounted thrusters" limitation of claim 2. None, however, discloses the rail/carriage/brake-conduit/elastic-harness combination of claim 1, so they cannot anticipate claim 1 — they are best used as secondary art to invalidate claim 2 when combined with a Tier-1/Tier-2 reference.

6. Tier 4 — Remaining cited references (background/§ 103 support only)

Each is directed to suspended-cable transport, rescue, or cableway observation and, on the record I retrieved, does not disclose the elastic-conduit-to-harness link. Titles/dates are taken from the patent's own citation list; descriptions are inferred from the titles and are flagged as such:

• US 301,923 A – Joseph eeisdoeff (1884-07-15) — title not stated in the record; early slide/rail art.
• US 1,684,251 A – Charles E. Thomas, "Safety carriage for derricks" (1927-02-24 / 1928-09-11).
• US 1,935,711 A – Rodney B. Hecox, "Guy wire slide" (1930-04-18 / 1933-11-21) — inclined wire descent, § 103 as to the rail/descent concept.
• US 4,934,277 A – Evacuation Systems, "Mobile aerial rapid rescue system" (1987-07-02 / 1990-06-19) — suspended-carriage evacuation.
• US 5,094,171 A – Petroleo Brasileiro S.A., "Cable guided platform escape vehicle with tubular frame construction" (1989-06-20 / 1992-03-10).
• US 2006/0137563 A1 – Robert Cummins, "Multi-capacity amusement ride" (2002-10-18 / 2006-06-29).
• US 2008/0022881 A1 – Asyst Shinko, "Traveling rails for carriage" (2006-07-07 / 2008-01-31).
• US 2008/0202375 A1 – Quattlebaum, "Self-driven cable transportation system…panoramic observation" (2007-02-27 / 2008-08-28).
• US 2010/0147180 A1 – Donald Ray Perry, "Elevated cableway for observation of nature" (2008-12-12 / 2010-06-17).
• US 2013/0312633 A1 – Martin C. Tilley, "Cable Transport System" (2008-05-23 / 2013-11-28).
• US 2011/0048274 A1 – Joop Roodenburg, "rollercoaster amusement device" (2007-08-16 / 2011-03-03).
• US 2012/0312186 A1 – Dennis Shasha, "Methods and systems for multi-dimensional motion" (2011-06-08 / 2012-12-13) — controllability of motion.
• US 2018… , US 9,393,496 B2 and US 9,682,326 B2 / US 2017/0043265 A1 – these appear in the family/"cited by" lists but are the same inventor's own continuations/division (later priority filer); they are not § 102 prior art against 9,120,023 and must not be treated as such.

7. Verdict

1. No single cited reference anticipates claims 1, 9, or 10. The examiner's citations are two autonomous clusters — suspended-coaster/zip-line rides and personal-flight/thruster devices — neither of which, alone, teaches the claimed elastic connector joining a depending brake conduit to the harness.
2. Most relevant overall reference: US 2009/0078148 A1 (Cylvick). It supplies the support structure, suspended rail, trolley/carriage, suspended harness, and curves (claims 1 and 7 elements) but lacks the brake-conduit/elastic-connector architecture.
3. Most relevant for the braking limitation: US 7,966,941 B1 (Brannan), whose hand-brake-on-trolley disclosure, and whose own description of bungee-cord impact braking, make it the strongest § 103 primary reference against the braking element.
4. For claim 2 (thrusters): US 3,149,798 (Bell) and US 3,236,477 (Moore) are the closest, disclosing pivotally vector-controlled body-mounted thrusters.
5. Caveat on confidence: I could not open the full text of every Tier-3/Tier-4 reference in this session; descriptions for those are inferred from the citation-list titles and my training knowledge. If you need anticipation-grade certainty (e.g., for an invalidity contention), each Tier-1/Tier-2 reference should be pulled from the USPTO full-text/PDF and element-by-element charted against claims 1(d)–(g) and 9/10.

I'll ground the key prior-art references before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me verify the remaining key references.

I hit the tool-call ceiling mid-verification. Below is the § 103 analysis based on the references I was able to verify live plus the authoritative citation table in the patent text. I flag which is which.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,120,023 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Framework and ground rules

Governing statute. The application was filed 2014‑11‑24 with benefit of provisional 61/990,481 filed 2014‑05‑08 — both after the AIA's 2013‑03‑16 effective date. AIA § 103 therefore governs: whether "the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date." KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) and Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) supply the operative test (scope/content of prior art; differences; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations), and MPEP 2141–2144 supplies the motivation rationales.

Level of ordinary skill (not defined in the patent — my construct). A person with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering (or equivalent), plus 2–5 years designing suspended-ride, zip-line, or fall-protection hardware; alternatively, several years of hands-on ride-engineering experience without a degree. This is a mature, mechanical, low-complexity art, which cuts toward obviousness — the KSR Court expressly noted that "a person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity."

Prior-art availability (AIA § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2)). Every examiner-cited reference below published or issued before 2014‑05‑08 and is therefore available. Two traps worth flagging:

Only US 7,966,941 B1 (the first Brannan patent) is usable; its 2014 and 2016 successors are not. Likewise, the Google Patents "Cited By" entries (Garland, Ropes Courses, UATP, Nabelsi, Bungy NZ) are not available against '023 despite appearing on the same page.

Verification note. I verified live the contents of Cylvick '148 (freepatentsonline/Justia/patentsencyclopedia), Kitchen '699 (freepatentsonline/patents-review), Brannan '941 (Google Patents/Justia/Patsnap), the Moore jet-vest lineage (patentimages PDFs of US 3,150,847 and US 4,040,577, plus secondary histories), and Cylvick's retrieval-line disclosures in the US 8,191,482/7,966,940 family. I was unable to verify the disclosures of US 2008/0142644 (O'Roark), US 6,360,669 (Innova), US 2005/0019736 (Noll), US 2002/0189488 (Ostrobrod), US 2012/0153088 (Lokeberg), US 2011/0133037 (Martin), and US 8,708,109 (Ziptrek); for those I rely on the titles in the patent's own citation table and I mark the inferences as such.

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1. Element-by-element mapping of claim 1

Claim 1 is the only claim that requires a full § 103 treatment; claims 9 and 10 are claim-1-plus-additions, and claims 2–8 are dependents.

Observation on where the patent's novelty actually sits. Elements (a)–(d) and (f) are squarely, even squarely-redundantly, in Cylvick '148 alone. The two limitations doing any work are (e) the dual-purpose depending brake conduit and (g) the elastic connector between that conduit and the harness. Note also that the "whereby" clause is a statement of intended result and, under Minton v. NASD / Hoffer v. Microsoft, carries patentable weight only to the extent it defines a structural or functional limitation — here, essentially none.

§ 112(f) caution (affects the mapping). "User-operated means for braking the carriage" uses "means," triggering a Williamson v. Citrix § 112(f) construction: the limitation is limited to the disclosed structure — brake pads 38 engaging wheels 36 via brake lines 47, actuated by hand brake assemblies 35 through conduits 24/46 — and equivalents. That is helpful to an obviousness attack because Brannan's hand levers + calipers + pads-on-pulleys is structurally the same mechanism, as opposed to, say, a gravity brake or a brakeman-held rope.

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2. Combination I — Cylvick '148 + Brannan '941 → claim 1

The combination. Substitute Brannan's rider-controlled trolley brake for Cylvick's rider-brake trolley of FIG. 14, and hang the harness below it on an elastic connector.

Motivation (multiple, cumulative):

1. Same field, same problem, same solution class. Both are suspended-cable/suspended-rail amusement trolleys. Brannan states his objective as allowing "a rider control of his or her speed while traversing along a suspended cable." Cylvick states the identical concern: "too much braking at a wrong time may not be permitted in order that a rider not leave a trolley stranded between two peaks." Brannan's brake is the answer to Cylvick's stated problem. Under MPEP 2144.04(III) ("use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way"), this is a textbook combination.
2. Applicant's own admission of the problem. The '023 Background concedes: "Zip lines attempt to provide soaring, but the participant has little or no control, and the ride is over in just a few seconds." The applicant thereby admitted a known, unmet need in her own field. A reference that supplies exactly the missing control is not merely combinable — it is suggested by the applicant's own characterization of the art.
3. Predictable result, established functions. Brake pads on a wheel/pulley, actuated by a lever through a cable: no new physics, no unexpected interaction. KSR: "the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions."

The soft spot — element (e). Cylvick does not show a brake conduit depending from the carriage. The bridge is that (i) both Cylvick and Kitchen '699 already suspend a rider support member (rod 118 / hanger 143) downward from the carriage, and (ii) routing a Bowden-type brake cable through its housing to the actuator is the most ordinary mechanical expedient in the art — bicycle brakes, zip-line brakes, and amusement-ride brakes all use it. Cylvick's own trolley-coasting disclosure plus a depending hanger plus a cable-actuated brake makes "hang the housing from the carriage" a design choice within MPEP 2144.04's "changes in shape/arrangement" rationale. I rate this strong but not airtight — it is an inference, not a literal disclosure, in the sources I verified.

The softer spot — element (g), the elastic connector. This is where I would expect the patent to survive a reexam and where an IPR petitioner would have to work hardest. My honest assessment:

• Brannan '941 does disclose that a bungee cord is a known implement in this exact art, connecting a rider-bearing element on a suspended cable to structure. That establishes the element was known and used for its elastic property in the same field.
• The claimed arrangement — elastic member interposed between a depending brake conduit and the harness so the rider hangs on a stretchy link — is not literally shown in any reference I verified.
• But the claimed function ("some give in the bungee cord," maintaining "a constant distance from the rail system") is precisely the established function of an elastic cord. Elastic energy-absorbing links between a rider and a moving carriage are ubiquitous in fall protection and in the bungee arts. Under KSR's "obvious to try" branch, and given that the spec describes the part only as "a bungee cord approximately 10 feet long" (an off-the-shelf commodity with no disclosed criticality of length, elasticity, or material), the limitation is vulnerable. Where a claim recites a known commodity at an arbitrary dimension with no disclosed criticality, the dimension is an obvious design choice (MPEP 2144.05).

Likely outcome on claim 1: More likely than not obvious under Cylvick + Brannan, with the elastic connector carried by the KSR "prior art elements according to their established functions" rationale plus the applicant's own admission that a bungee cord is a known commodity. Non-obviousness would have to rest on an argument that the combination of a depending brake conduit and an elastic connector produces an unexpected result (e.g., a rider who can "step off a platform into thin air" while retaining brake control). I do not see that synergy articulated anywhere in the specification.

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3. Dependent claims 2, 6, 7, 8

Claim 7 ("path of travel comprises one or more curves") — essentially anticipated in substance. Cylvick '148: "The rail may turn in substantially any direction"; FIG. 23 "a corkscrew segment of a rail system"; roller-coaster format where "the rail may rise and drop repeatedly in an undulating fashion." Claim 7 adds nothing.

Claim 6 ("plurality of vertical support members … support struts mounted on the top") — squarely disclosed. Cylvick '148 FIG. 25: "an alternative embodiment of a system of poles and arms as a structure suspending a rail." Cylvick's towers 22 with guy portions 21 read on the vertical member/strut architecture. Also independently, Kitchen '699: towers 102 (6–60 m) with stay cables 108 balancing the tower against the cable pull. Claim 6 is the weakest claim in the set.

Claim 8 ("the harness is decorative"). This is the clearest § 103 failure point in the patent. The limitation is purely ornamental; it changes no structure, no load path, no function. Under MPEP 2144.04 and the In re Carletti line, a change in appearance that is not shown to produce an unexpected result is an obvious design choice. Ornamentation is the subject matter of 35 U.S.C. § 171 design patents, not § 101/§ 103 utility claims.

The best counter for the patentee is that the spec ties decor to function: "For progressively easier runs suitable for younger or first time riders, for example, the smaller the bird the smaller the ride." That is a colorable argument that the decorative form carries ride-scale information. It is thin — nothing in claim 8 recites scale or course difficulty — but note the In re Seid line, where an ornamental shape change not suggested by the art survived § 103. I would expect this claim to be invalidated on summary judgment or cancelled in reexam, but it is the one dependent claim with a non-trivial counterargument.

Claim 2 ("one or more thrusters pivotally mounted to the harness"). This is the most defensible dependent claim on the merits, and it is nonetheless obvious — but only because the prior art is unusually on point.

• US 4,040,577 (US Army / Lockwood airfoil), verified: a "man transport jet type apparatus … includes a harness mechanism for attaching the device to the body of an individual"; two jet engines on a "back vest type plate 20"; and a "central control panel with a control for actuating fuel valves … a control for controlling vanes or swivelable nozzles at the outlet ends of the jet engines to control roll and pitch." A thruster mounted on a harness, with a pivotable/vectorable nozzle and a control panel — that is claim 2 almost verbatim (minus the word "pivotally," which "swivelable" supplies).
• Moore jet vest (US 3,236,477 / US 3,150,847), verified via patent PDFs and secondary histories: hydrogen-peroxide rocket vest with hand controls, a chest-mounted control box, and hand-controlled swivelable nozzles for thrust vectoring; the 1952 tethered flights are documented. This is the family cited twice by the examiner (the only family-to-family citation in the record).
• Also cited: US 3,149,798 (Bell Aerospace, individual flight device), US 3,570,785 (NASA, personal propulsion unit), US 2,509,603 (Marin Marcel, "Steering of portable reaction motors," 1950), US 3,558,079 (North American Rockwell, maneuvering space vehicles), and US 2008/0142644 A1 (O'Roark, "Flight apparatus having movable motors") — the last being, on its title alone, a near-literal reading of "pivotally mounted thrusters" (unverified content).

Motivation to combine is expressly supplied by the applicant's own specification: thrusters provide "optional forward thrusting force for increased speed" and "steering is enhanced by pivoting thruster 67 to change the direction of thrust using control panel 68." Both stated purposes — added speed and vectored steering — are the identical established functions jet-vest thrusters were designed to perform. Where the applicant copies the function verbatim from the prior art and adds it to a gravity ride to address the ride's own admitted shortfall ("courses that could last for many minutes at a time depending on the grade and height of the course," i.e., limited by available drop), the combination is obvious as a matter of law under MPEP 2144.04(III). Claim 2 is obvious over Cylvick + Brannan + any of US 4,040,577 / Moore '477 / O'Roark '644.

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4. Claims 3, 4, 5 (ceiling-suspended rail) — the patent's strongest ground

These are the only claims where I think the cited art is genuinely thin.

• Claim 3 requires the support structure to comprise "an apparatus housing having a ceiling," with the rail suspended from that ceiling.
• Claim 4 adds "a plurality of support members mounted to the ceiling."
• Claim 5 adds "support struts attached to the distal end of each … support member."

The cited art discloses overhead suspension — Cylvick's suspension cables anchored to towers and "a lattice of supporting infrastructure with an arrangement of the coaster rail there below," and Kitchen '699's catenary suspension cable 110 slung between towers — but not, in anything I verified, a rail hung from the ceiling of an enclosed building.

The powerful argument against the patentee is her own specification. The '023 disclosure presents ground support and ceiling support as interchangeable options: "One exemplary embodiment provides rail system 16 erected vertically on terrain 11 with … scaffolding … In other exemplary embodiments, particularly enclosed embodiments, rail system 16 is suspended from the ceiling … In still other exemplary embodiments, a combination of floor support members … and suspension members descending from the roof." An applicant who discloses two support topologies as functionally equivalent alternatives has effectively conceded that the choice between them is an arbitrary design preference. That is not prior art under § 102 (a patent is not "by another" against itself), but statements in a specification are competent evidence of the level of ordinary skill and of what the applicant regarded as conventional (the "applicant admission" doctrine). MPEP 2145 and In re Wilson support using such statements.

Secondarily: indoor/warehouse-installed suspended coasters are old and well-known in the amusement industry (the patent's own class B61B 3/00, "elevated railway systems with suspended vehicles," and cited US 5,979,333 to Vekoma — a hanging-coaster manufacturer — point there, though I did not verify US 5,979,333's content). I would rate claims 3–5 as likely obvious but the weakest link in a § 103 attack on this patent, and the place to look for art outside the examiner's 31 references.

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5. Claims 9 and 10 (return rail; enclosed housing) — obvious, with an antecedent-basis overlay

Claim 9 = claim 1 + (h) a return rail connecting landing terminus to takeoff terminus. Two independent mappings, both strong:

1. Kitchen '699 is nearly anticipatory in substance. "The track 101 is a continuous loop that can be between 150 meters and 500 meters long"; "A single rail track 101 is suspended in the air from towers 102"; loading area 106 with deliberately shortened towers "to bring the flyer train 105 closer to the ground"; riders "in a generally front down orientation." A single-rail continuous loop with a high station and a low loading station is a return rail plus a takeoff/landing pair. Kitchen '699 also adds "means to reduce and/or limit the amount of sway and/or twisting that the rides can experience" — the same stability problem the '023 spec addresses with guide wires 25.
2. Cylvick's own later work, if brought in. Although not in the '023 citation table, Cylvick's US 8,191,482 B2 / US 7,966,940 (verified) describe a trolley retrieval system: "A retrieval line may be suspended in an open line or in a closed loop extending from proximate a start area to proximate a finish area," with the express economic rationale to "maximize user throughput, minimize operator interaction, and increase safety." That is the claim-9 "whereby" clause — "the empty harness is returned to the takeoff terminus" — in the prior art's own words. As same-field, same-problem analogous art, Cylvick '482 would be properly combinable. (Caveat: it is not one of the 31 examiner citations, so if you are limited to the record, Kitchen '699 carries claim 9.)

Motivation for the return rail is straightforwardly economic and is stated in the prior art itself (Cylvick: throughput/operator interaction) and by the applicant ("There is also the potential to run multiple flyers on multiple courses at staggered start times"). Return/recirculation to raise throughput in a gravity-fed ride is exactly the "market demand" and "design incentive" rationale KSR endorses.

Claim 10 = a full enclosed system with a ceiling-mounted support structure, an inclined rail from a takeoff near the ceiling to a landing near the floor, a carriage, a harness, an elastic connector, and a return rail. It is claim 9 plus claims 3–5 plus the indoor environment — so it is obvious for all the reasons above cumulatively, and it depends on the same weakest link (claims 3–5's ceiling suspension) plus the elastic connector.

Repeat-and-emphasize the § 112 defect (cross-referenced from the prior section, not re-argued). As issued, claim 10 recites element (f) "an elastic connector connecting the brake conduit to the harness" without ever reciting a brake conduit, or indeed any braking means, in elements (a)–(e). If claim 10 is construed as indefinite under § 112(b) (no antecedent basis), it may be invalid on that ground before obviousness is ever reached. That is a second, independent invalidity vector — noted here only to avoid double-counting it as part of the § 103 case.

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6. Cumulative motivation summary (KSR / MPEP 2143 rationales)

That last item deserves a sentence. The '023 abstract opens by cataloguing "the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, screw, and inclined plane," and then states the invention "provides a carriage, wheels and an axle, a harness, and a braking and steering system." An applicant's own characterization of her claims as a recombination of the six classical simple machines is an unusually candid concession that the asserted advance lies in arrangement and purpose, not in any new element — which is precisely the fact pattern KSR resolves against patentability.

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7. Rebuttals I would expect, and how they fare

A. Teaching away (elastic cords). Kitchen's US 5,931,740 (which surfaced in my searches but is not an examiner citation here) extols "the thrills and excitement of bungee jumping, but without the dangers related to the use of rubber or elastic cords." If the patentee located that reference, it is a colorable teaching-away argument against element (g). My assessment: weak. In re Fulton and MPEP 2145 require the reference to criticize, discredit, or otherwise discourage the claimed solution. Kitchen '740 disparages elastic cords in the context of a swing ride where elastic recoil is the hazard; the '023 connector is a static, pre-tensioned suspension link, not the recoil element of a bungee jump. A general preference against one material is not a teaching away from a specific arrangement.

B. Secondary considerations (objective indicia). I found nothing in the record: no assignee (Google Patents lists "Individual"), no licensing, no evidence of commercial success, no copying, no industry praise, no long-felt-but-unmet need beyond the applicant's own conclusory Background. A nexus between any such evidence and the claimed subject matter would also be required (In re GPAC; In re Kao). Absent evidence, this prong is a null set — which, given how close the art is, materially improves the obviousness case.

C. "The combination is not suggested as a whole." The strongest form of this argument is that no reference suggests putting a rider-operable brake and an elastic suspension link on the same depending member, because an elastic link decouples the rider from the carriage and could be argued to degrade brake-response fidelity. That is a genuine design tension and the patentee's best non-obviousness argument on claim 1. Its weakness is that the specification never identifies or solves that tension, and KSR requires the patentee to show more than that a combination was not expressly spelled out.

D. Structural-inference objections. I do not want to overstate the record: element (e) (the depending brake conduit) and element (g) (the elastic connector between that conduit and the harness) are inferred combinations in my chart, not literal disclosures in the verified references. A rigorous petition would need a secondary reference that literally shows a brake-cable housing forming the structural suspension column, and one that literally shows an elastic member between a suspended-ride carriage and a harness. I did not find either among the 31 examiner citations. This is the weakest factual link in the analysis and the first thing to shore up.

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8. Bottom line

• Claims 2, 6, 7, 8: obvious. Claim 7 is effectively disclosed by Cylvick '148; claim 6 by Cylvick's FIG. 25 "poles and arms"; claim 2 by Cylvick + Brannan + US 4,040,577 or the Moore jet vest (US 3,236,477), with motivation supplied by the applicant's own recitation of the thrusters' purposes; claim 8 fails as an ornamental design choice (with the Seid counterargument noted).
• Claims 1, 9: more likely than not obvious over Cylvick '148 + Brannan '941 (claim 1), with claim 9 added by Kitchen '699's continuous single-rail loop and/or Cylvick's closed-loop retrieval teaching. The elastic connector is the only limitation with meaningful survival prospects, and it is vulnerable as an off-the-shelf commodity used for its known function — Brannan '941 itself confirms bungee cords were known in this field.
• Claims 3, 4, 5 (and therefore much of claim 10): the best non-obviousness position in the patent, because the cited art discloses overhead cable/catenary suspension but not suspension from a building ceiling. The applicant's own specification, presenting ground and ceiling support as interchangeable embodiments, substantially undercuts even this.
• Independent validity overlay: the § 112(b) antecedent-basis holes in claims 9 and 10 (cross-referenced from the earlier section and not re-argued) may render claim 10 invalid before § 103 is reached.

Confidence. High on claims 6, 7, 8 and on the ultimate conclusion for claim 2. Moderate on claim 1/9, contingent on locating a reference that literally discloses an elastic member between a suspended-ride carriage and a harness. Moderate-to-low on claims 3–5 absent art outside the 31 examiner citations. I could not access PACER, the USPTO assignment database, or the full text of seven of the cited references; where I relied on titles rather than verified disclosures, I have said so above and those inferences should not be treated as established facts.