Blue Angels F-18A Hornet on E-Bay

In article , Paul Michael Brown
wrote:

A poorly rigged slat could spell disaster.

Not usually a problem if only called upon to do their job in 1 G level
flight. It's slat behavior in the flight regime at 300+KIAS that mark the
work of a capable airframes shop.

OK, I've never been there, or done that. But it seems to me that the slats
are *really* simple. Obviously I'm missing something here. What is it
about the design and/or maintenance of the slats that requires "a capable
airframes shop?"

Yep, they are dirt simple until one of the rollers gets a bit sticky or
one of the slats gets a little bent then the devils's in the details.
As was noted, it doesn't make much of a difference in normal flight but
the first time you go into the merge and pitch hard and one sticks it's
a pretty damn violent effect that can range from simply a hard roll
away from the deployed side that corrects itself, to damn near tumbling
the airplane. The guys in my TRARON, who were civilian maint at the
time, did a pretty fair job of maintaining them to the point of
applying grease and such with Q-tips, they also had a gauge that looked
shop-made that they could push on the slats to measure how much force
it took to move and they tried to make the slats on each jet the same.


Pugs