Super Stadium
This episode goes behind the scenes with the team building the world’s most advanced sports arena – the 1.2-billion-pound Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta. It will hold up to 75 thousand fans, incorporate the world’s biggest sports screen – a 360-degree ‘Halo Board’ and feature the most ambitious retractable roof ever built. Powered by 96 motors, weighing three-and-a-half thousand tons and made of eight vast steel ‘petals’, this roof will open and close like a camera iris.
Facing unprecedented engineering challenges, the construction team has no time to waste. This ground breaking arena must be open for the start of the football season. It’s down to Avery Martin and his team of ironworkers to build the arena. Their first challenge is to find a way to jack down the 15,000 ton fixed roof trusses. Working 300 feet above the ground, they then face deadly winds as they battle to control the vast steel sections of the retractable roof, raised into position by America’s biggest crawler crane.
We will discover the ingenuity required to design, build and install the 62,000 square foot Halo Board that must withstand all the weather Mother Nature can throw at it. As the complex mechanised roof structure nears completion, our cameras are there to capture the critical first test to close the roof. Nobody knows whether this untested design will actually work. As the opening game of the season looms, the crew face a race against time and weather to complete this epic stadium.