Mercedes-Benz Stadium's roof opens the way it was intended

ATLANTA — The retractable roof at Mercedes-Benz Stadium is officially complete. The stadium opened 10 months ago and now the roof is ready.

Crews have been working on the stadium’s retractable roof for the past year trying to get it working as it should.

Channel 2 Action News had cameras from every angle as the stadium roof opened as intended for the first time Wednesday afternoon.

"It was never a situation of, 'Is the roof broken?' The roof just took some time to do some final tweaking. There's nothing more complex than the piece of engineering that we're looking at right now," AMB Group CEO Steve Cannon told Channel 2's Justin Wilfon.

While stadium operators could open the roof when the stadium first opened in 2017, it was not fully functional until now.

“We never had any doubt that this was going to work,” said Mike Egan, senior vice president of AMB Group.

The Atlanta Falcons invited us to watch the roof’s grand debut from platforms inside of it.

Slowly but surely, Wilfon watched the roof open in just over eight minutes – even quicker than engineers say they intended.

After working on the roof for much of the past year, stadium officials said they fixed the roof by improving the suspension system.

“We built in a little more flexibility in the pedals, so they maintained distribution of weight over the two rails as it runs back and forth,” Egan said.

After all that work, the stadium’s wings finally took flight.

“Projects that are this complex and this massive, things like this happen all the time,” Cannon said.

Wilfon asked the stadium operators if the work to fix the roof cost them anymore money. They said it was included in the $1.5 billion budget.

Cox Media Group