During envelope expansion flights of the F/A-18E/F in the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase, the aircraft encountered uncommanded lateral activity, which was labeled “wing drop”. An extensive resolution process was undertaken by the Navy and its contractors to resolve this issue. A production solution was developed, which concluded revising the flight control laws and the incorporation of a porous wing fold fairing to eliminate the wing drop tendencies of the pre-production F/A-18E/F. The wing drop events were traced to an abrupt wing stall (AWS) on either the left or right wing panel, causing a sudden and severe roll-off in the direction of the stalled wing.

Perhaps the most demanding of all aviation environments, the operation of aircraft from ship platforms involves turbulent airwake produced by a ship’s superstructure. This phenomenon is a major contribution to the workload required for such operations. Past airwake modeling efforts were, at best rudimentary, offering only representative levels of turbulence for a particular ship class. The current study involves the prediction of time variance for ship dynamics variables.