Another tragic accident....and some
very uniformed comment as to the maintenance procedures with regard to tyre inflation.
As ever on this site, speculation with regard to the causal factors is rife.
So, let's try and take a more realistic overview of the
possible causes shall we.
From the information so far, it can be assumed the aircraft was not on a T/R and therefore the tyre px would be cold and were being recorded as part of an A/F. Possibly they were within the min / max px values but towards the lower end and therefore needed to be adjusted as there would be no other reason to inflate an in-situ tyre. So far, so routine..
unless the wheel was being changed for whatever reason...ie a new bay serviced item was being fitted to the a/c in which case it would need to be inflated from storage and / or transportation px ....thus it would be a new assembly and would / should have been subjected to a rigourous testing and inspection procedure anyway ..and at this point
we simply do not know the circumstances applicable, the point being that both scenarios offer different possibilities as to why the incident occurred.
Tyres however, do not simply "let go" at random. So far, nobody has mentiond the
possible condition of the tyre....such as any one of the following:
Embedded object
Deep cut
Bulge
Tread seperation
To name but four
possible other contributory factors.
The classical and invariably tragic
bar / psi confusion has been mentioned of
course as has the possibility of a failure of the retaining bolts or hub.
As for a cage on a Line station, maybe, maybe not depending on the operator....however....it would be highly unlikely that even with a cage, for routine adjustment of tyre px, the wheel assy, would be removed, placed in a cage, inflated, and then re-fitted given that the adjustment px is only ever going to be a small value. Inflation from transportation / storage is another matter however.
G-SCAW....whatever you do for a living, one thing's for certain, you are
not an engineer !...but thank you for your first paragraph in Post 5....most "entertaining"....
...and for your info, oxygen bottles are usually charged to around 1800psi on an aircraft.
Along with everybody else, I wish the individual concerned a full recovery....however...and has invariably been the case within aviation, the incident offers yet another safety awareness exemplification with regard to procedures and practices and from my perspective, a more than valid one.
The official report on the incident will therefore make interesting reading.