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Old 12th Jan 2007, 06:24
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The causes of tyre failure are well documented and the results are often similiar to this. A costly investigation would probably be inconclusive as to the cause and would not add anything to prevent this happening in the future.
Thats probably just half of the truth. During certification of new aircraft, a lot of so called "System Safety Analysis" is done, to prove the aircraft system design is safe enough. This analysis is taking into account possible failures, causes, effects and probabilities. To do an accurate analysis, you need a good database of incidents and accidents, to come up with the right numbers for probabilities i.e. the probability of a tyre failure causing a hydraulic failure.
Therefore it is important, that any accident and incident is well investigated and published to the right people, so that the database they base their work on is accurate. The probability for hydraulic failures caused by tyre burst is not very high, so each single case has a impact on the numbers used.

So this event may not "add anything to prevent this happening in the future", but it may influence future aircraft design with respect to routing of hydraulic lines in the trajectory of tyre debris, and hence make future aircraft designs safer.
It has often been a single event, that changed the rules in the past. Unfortunately it often takes a number of fatalities to rate the event serious enough. If the first damage to a concorde fuel tank skin by a bursting tyre (don´t know the date, but it was in the 80s in Washington) would have been taken seriously, the CDG accident may have been prevented, and the "queen of the skies" may still be around today.
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