On Monday, June 11, 2018 at 11:54:14 AM UTC-7, wrote:
Irrelevant.

Fully relevant. Engineers were surprised to discover that under certain conditions of wear and abuse, the PCU would produce outputs that were exactly the opposite of those commensurate with the input conditions.

I've disassembled three or four different types of gas spring (each of my gliders has two), and I'm pretty sure that there are possible failure modes in which the unit resists opening instead of assisting it. They're probably not common failures, but I'd bet solidly against impossible.

Bob K.