If you’ve been on a plane that’s landed hard, you probably wondered why the tires didn’t pop. In this video Brandy Moorhead, Goodyear’s director of off-highway product development, explains how jet tires are made to withstand a 175,000-lb 737’s hard landing.
For one thing, jet tires are made from a specially reinforced material not used in car or truck tires. Also, jet tires are inflated twice as much as truck tires and six times as much as car tires to give them extra strength. They are inflated with nitrogen instead of air, because nitrogen is an inert gas, which means pressure and temperature changes have less of an effect on the tires’ characteristics. And the are retreaded every 500 landings.
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