Timmy C wrote:
What are the dark stripes on the flight deck here, that makes the deck look like tiles?
They are merely a product of the angle of reflection. The ‘grain’ if you will.
Non-skid is applied with a roller. In order to ensure that the weld beads that join the steel deck panels are adequately covered, we first roll a swath covering the weld, in a direction
perpendicular to the weld. Then the rest of the flat surface is filled in. What you're seeing is the resulting 'grain' where some strokes run in one direction and the rest of the panel in another. In the picture, you don’t see the dark lines on weld beads that run in the athwart ship direction because they are parallel to the direction used to fill in the panel.
Read on for more detail:
Navy non-skid is a thick, jet black, tar-like coating that comes in 5-gallon plastic buckets and must be applied just so in a mysterious ritual of surface preparation with expensive hydroblasting equipment and large vacuum hoppers (to suck up the resulting grit). Critically important are the right conditions of temperature, weather, humidity, surface preparation profile, etc. You must apply the primer perfectly in accordance with the instructions, and with great amounts of humility, patience, kindness and one or two voodoo sacrifice. Without the latter, and despite all efforts by the Air Boss’s rabid ‘wet-non skid’ Gestapo, several boot prints will invariably appear in the fresh ‘skid overnight, right in the middle of the flight deck where it’s impossible for someone to have walked without being seen. Then a big, fat jet drops a tailhook on it and tears off a foot-long strip of our beloved, priceless fresco non-skid... but I digress.
The coating is applied to the flight deck by civilian contractors at great expense (in the order of $1M to completely resurface a CVN). Carriers are entirely re-coated once per deployment cycle, usually early in the training phase. The landing area – the part that takes the abuse from tailhooks – gets re-done again just prior to deployment. There may also be some patch repair work here and there. Island walkways, the fantail and internal decks areas (and non-aviation surfaces on smaller ships) aren’t subject to the same tight NAVAIR standards and may be done by the crew, typically without the specialized training or hydroblasting equipment, etc. The result is all too often brown non-skid (rust creeping through) or a pink sheen poking through (primer bleeding through), etc.
The stuff is so thick that it forms ridges as high as ~10mm along the path of the roller. The resulting surface is semi-gloss and very close to black tar in color when new. And, like road tar, in a matter of weeks it has faded noticeably into progressively lighter shades of gray. Add to this the weathering effect of hydraulic fluids, fuel, rubber boots, etc.
And now you know… the rest of the story…
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