The Fighting 99th Air Wing

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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre

7 years 10 months ago
pb_magnet
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #547
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7 years 10 months ago
Sweeper
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3920
Dafuq?

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7 years 10 months ago
Ktulu2
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3921
Well...Someone had a bumpy ride...

How can this even happen LOL

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7 years 10 months ago
TracerFacer
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3922
Normally.. I look at someone with a flat tire.. and say "At least it's only flat on one side.."

Can't really say that here..clearly no silver lining.

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7 years 10 months ago
runny
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3923
No way that just happened. That tire would be shredded and would have been wrapped around the gear. The rim wouldn't be all nice and pristine either.

I call photoshop.

Actually it looks like they might've put a vacuum on it.

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7 years 10 months ago
pb_magnet
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3924
Well, there should be an incident report somewhere. The aircraft's ID is listed in the linked article. Maybe someone with knowledge of these reports could look it up for us?

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7 years 10 months ago
TracerFacer
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3925

think you might be on to something there.. it's uniformly sucked in...

But then again, but I don't know what piece of support equipment would do this. I've worked around a few air planes before.. removed a few tires before from C-9's and C-130's.. don't know what kind of equipment they would have on hand to do something like that.

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7 years 10 months ago
Ktulu2
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3926
After looking at a bunch of articles, it is said very often that the photo was not and does not seem photoshoped.
My explanation (obviously a guess) :
Assume the tire was de-pressurized [the crew had a de-pressurized tire warning]. Now the wheel can turn and everything and as it turns, the tire bends around the ground. But aircraft tires, and tires in general, are quite solid. So when it moves around, without inside pressure, it tries to get into a stable shape which happens to be squared, as the tension in the tire is stronger than gravity. Kinds of reminds me when I turned an RC car tire inside-out and it stayed square.

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7 years 10 months ago
Vampyre
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3927
My suspicion would be that the tire had a slow leak that was not noticed before the aircraft took off. The aircraft being an A380 spent a lot of time at altitude where the tire pressure equalized with the outside air pressure. The air pressure at 30-40k ft is far lower than the pressure on the ground. When the aircraft started to descend the leak point was sealed by the tire collapsing in on itself which resulted in what you see here. Normally, from the tires I have worked with, aircraft tires are 26-28 ply nylon tread and hold their shape really well when uninflated. It would be fun to open up the valve core to see what happens.

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7 years 10 months ago
Cygon_Parrot
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3928
:cheer:

Yah, what Vampyre says at the end there I agree with, and no I do NOT believe it is photoshop. However, I also doubt (though there's always the benefit of the doubt) that just atmospheric pressure was solely to blame here. The atmospheric pressure outside at cruise altitudes is about 3PSI. That's the pressure it would have equalized to with a leak. It would then have been brought down to sea level, at some 15PSI (ok, ok, 14.7 for nerds). The absolute diferencial would therefore be just 12PSI. I doubt that is enough to implode a 24 ply monster rated for 225 mph and built to have a normal inflation of 180 to 210 PSI. Seriously doubt, we're not talking about a plastic coke bottle.

However, note that this wheel is on a canting bogie arrangement. They tend to chatter if there is any sideload, shock touch down, or assymetry on the foot print. That would certainly have helped the lower pressure inside overcome the strength of the tire face and sidewalls and allowed it to complete the implosion. Take a look at an extreme example...

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7 years 10 months ago
TracerFacer
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3929
At first glance The Landing doesn't seem that bad but when they slow it down you can really see the landing gear takes a beating.

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7 years 10 months ago
Cygon_Parrot
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3931
Look at the TSR 2 at about 0:28 . More obvious than the last video, and it was the one I was looking for last night as a prime example but was too tired for prolonged browsing around. No mistaking how bad that chattering can get on tandem bogies on this particular mishandled landing. That square wheel in the OP probably wouldn't have happened had the same situation occurred on an A320 or 737, for example, with dual wheel on a common axis line. My 2 cents...

PS: Just to put it in perspective; if you stand on one foot you are exerting around 10 PSI or so on the ground. I know for a fact you can stand on one foot on top of the face of a flat aircraft tire and it does not even show signs of giving. Now maybe if that same pressure is exerted on every square inch of the face, I don't know, but still doubt it.

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7 years 10 months ago
pyromaniac4002
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3932
Quick side note: that landing video is a spot-on representation of what plays in my head every time I read one of you guys' FSX debriefings and it says "extreme weather landing."

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7 years 10 months ago
Toolbandit
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3935
looks like the tire on my chevy last week!
thanks for posting S!
-TooL

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7 years 10 months ago
runny
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Incident: British Airways A388 square tyre #3938
Even with the chattering and lateral load though. I've seen plenty of tires peel off the rim from lateral load (although they're set at 12-16 psi) but never ever seen one go to a square shape.

Equipment on hand could be a vacuum pump used for air conditioning systems..

Very odd how uniform and seemingly undamaged it is. Even the bead looks perfect. You'd think that under some kind of major failure, especially if they're pumped up to 100+ psi, that things would have come apart pretty spectacularly.

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