SAE AIR5713

An industry survey has been completed to determine the incidence of jam and excessive backlash in rotary and linear mechanical actuators subject to "primary flight control like" duty cycles. The data is valuable for understanding how existing mechanical actuators behave in service, identifying areas for potential improvement and possibly being used as a reference to support future primary flight control system trade-off studies.

The purpose of this information report is to compile the results of the survey so the data can be made available to the industry as an aid for those specifying, designing, and certifying EM actuators, as well as those developing reliability and safety analyses and reports for these actuators

This report is written with commercial aircraft flight control system application in mind but the data presented is equally applicable to other aircraft systems or other aircraft categories.