To stay on the original
. I am a survivor of a stuck slat incedent, and believe me I bought my pilot a steak dinner that night after properly disposing of my Flight suit.
I flew EA-3B's in the Navy as an Aircrewman. The A-3 is the navy version of the Douglas B-66 Airforce bomber. It was a late 40s early 50s twin jet design. On the edge of the wings outboard of the engines they had 3 sets of slats (On CLEO Winged A-3s they had 1 more slat on the inboard of the engine)that were Free fall type. I.E. the combination of Airspeed and angle of attack would retract them and as you slowed down the speed / angle of attack was not enough to keep them in would allow the weight to over come and they would extend. On our Modern day passengers these slats extend electrically. These slats enhance the curvature of the wing (IE making the little air molocules run faster over the top of the wing to catch his buddies taking the short path under the wing thereby lowering the pressure exerted on the Upper part of the wing making the air LIFT the wing UP (the principle of lift in simple form)) There for slats INCREASE lift at that time you want to slow down to land (IE if you dint have slats and flaps to increase lift you would need to fly faster to land and thats a BAD thing) Any way below is what happens when one slat disobeys and doesnt drop for some reason.
Anyway as a 3rd seater(I sat behind the Pilot looking backwards)/plane Captain/Crewleader/EWOP (Many jobs huh) on preflight one of my duties was to Push up on the slat to ensure free travel(the pilot did this also but hadnt gotten to this side yet). On this day I had one that traveled but didnt feel right. I had my pilot check and he agreed. So we called a mech out who said it just needed Grease and he would fix. Well He Greased it up and it APPEARED (Operative word here) to roll ok.
Well long story short it wasnt. We went a flying around and on return the slats came out save one. Well .. guess what happend. HARD roll over. Why did it, well you take a wing that has 2 slats out (1 stuck) I doesnt create as much lift as the 3 on the other side, well that creates a really NASTY hard roll
). I dont know what my pilot did but he righted it (somewhere past the 90 degree rotation) and then accelerated (I think that was taken care of by the Ensuing dive we went into
) to get slats in. We then did a couple of manuvers designed to UNSTICK the slats (if the condition continues you have 1 choice BAIL because they are mechanical remember and if one sticks bad you cannot slow without losing control of the aircraft, the airlerons are not enough to correct it) Anyway this one finaly POPPED enough to drop with its friends. Found out later it was A roller bearing going bad on one of the slat tracks.
Poopy pant making day that was.
SO did that help with what slats do
.
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Rick "Firefox" Scott
VMF-214 / MAG 11
WB ID: firefx
AH ID: FirefxAT
Have Gun Will Travel
[This message has been edited by Firefox (edited 10-12-1999).]
