“Slam Stick”™ Helps NAVAIR Engineers Troubleshoot Aircraft
Posted by David Manion at Sep 26, 2016
NAVAIR News Article Featuring the Slam Stick. Published September 13, 2016: The proverb “Good things come in small packages” may well be the new mantra of the avionics department of Naval Air Systems Command’s (NAVAIR) In-Service Support Center-North Island.
An engineering tool called “Slam Stick”™ is helping to identify some of the most perplexing maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) issues NAVAIR engineers face every day.
Manufactured by Midé and designed to measure and record vibrations, temperature, and air pressure, the lightweight Slam Stick is a sensor that is 3 inches in length and less than 2 inches in width. And with a depth of slightly over one-half an inch, the device can be placed virtually anywhere in an aircraft from the pilot’s shirt pocket to the least accessible bay.
“It has a three axes accelerometer which basically measures acceleration and vibration. It also has a DC accelerometer which means that it measures gravity,” said avionics engineer and Avionics Advanced Technologies Investment (ATI) Team Lead Brett Gardner.
“I saw this technology at a Small Business Innovative Research conference. The device there was just the accelerometer. It didn’t have the pressure or temperature capacity and was a 16-gigabyte model that was basically useless to us,” he said...
