Bill Kitchen

Kitchen has a background in electrical engineering and initially put it to use in radio broadcasting before shifting his interests to skydiving and thrill seeking in 1990. He developed a thrill ride company, Sky Fun 1, Inc. with Ken Bird in 1992. Beginning with the resulting "Skycoaster", he continued to develop and sell thrill ride industry concepts through patents including the iFly indoor skydiving wind tunnel, Unicoaster circular ride (operating as Brain Surge), and Polercoaster vertical roller coaster tower ride. In 2015 he founded Thrillcorp, Inc. with longtime business partners Micheal Kitchen and David Gust in order to play a larger role in the physical development and applications of their ride concepts.

iFly (formerly Skyventure)

In 1995, before the sale of Skycoaster, Kitchen began developing his ideas for another method of simulating skydiving by use of a vertical wind tunnel. He filed the first version of this patent as a "Skydiving Trainer Windtunnel" that year. Kitchen then hired an engineer named Michael Palmer to assist him in refining his concept and in 1998, after licensing the Skycoaster business, filed an improved patent that represented the first proof of concept and prototype Skyventure location in Orlando, Florida. Kitchen's Skyventure attracted the attention of Alan Metni, of the U.S. Skydiving team, Airspeed, after a training session there. They began working together to expand the business and in 2002 Kitchen sold to Metni the rights to the Skyventure business which was then rebranded as iFly.