avherald.com/h?article=498050d8&opt=0

Dafuq?

Well...Someone had a bumpy ride...

How can this even happen LOL

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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."

looks like the tire on my chevy last week!
thanks for posting S!
-TooL

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.