Spotted: Vali Holl Appears to Be Testing a Flight Attendant Equipped RockShox Boxxer

An eagle-eyed reader, travis75az, spotted what appears to be a Flight Attendant module atop a Rockshox Boxxer, in Episode 1 of Vali Holl's "It Is What It Is". In the short slow motion clip, a battery-housing device can clearly be seen on the damper side, looking remarkably similar (if a little less refined) to the Flight Attendant modules that RockShox has rolled out across their enduro, trail, and most recently, XC forks.

The clip is recent footage from the Ding Dingue Down DH race held in Blausasc, France, on April 14th 2024. Aboard that prototype YT Tues that remains under a shroud of mystery, Vali took the win by a comfortable margin of more than 3.5 seconds over Lisa Baumann of Commencal Les Orres.

It's certainly not the first time we've seen electronics controlling suspension damping in the world of downhill. Loic Bruni has, for many, many seasons, been running an electronic remote on the bar of his various Specialized Demo bikes to make on-the-fly changes to his Ohlins suspension setup. To my knowledge, we are yet to see anything that controls the suspension damping automatically, in response to changes in terrain, as Flight Attendant does.


RockShox claim that over the course of a 90 minute World Cup XCO race, Flight Attendant can save up to 96 seconds; their internal testing showed that XC riders with the system were 1.8% faster than those on a manual system. How such an advantage (if any) would extrapolate to the rigors of downhill racing remains to be seen, but I for one would be very interested to see the results from timed testing. We will be keeping a close eye at the opening round of the World Cup in Fort William this weekend to see if any more RockShox athletes will be riding the new technology.

Of course, there's no way of knowing how exactly Flight Attendant is being implemented here, or indeed if that even is a Flight Attendant module that we can see in the video. The possibility remains that it is simply a data acquisition device, rather than a device that is able to adjust oil flow through the damper, but my money would be on the latter. We have reached out to SRAM for comment, and will update this article should any more information come to light.

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Reviews and Tech Spotted Suspension Fork RockShox Rockshox Boxxer Vali Holl