Feathers McGraw
A tyre did not fail. Not in the sense I think you infer anyway. The destruction of the tyre was caused by a metal strip, about 15 inches long by 2 inches wide, which had departed from a DC10 that had taken off before Concorde. The metal had deformed itself in such a way that whatever way it landed on the ground it had a sharp edge uppermost. Concorde ran over it and it shredded a tyre. A piece flew off and ruptured the inner port tank...............later when they returned Concorde to service they placed moulded panels on the base of every tank so that if such an incident re-occurred only 7 litres/sec of fuel could escape.
breakadjuster
I assume you were not being sarcastic about the fuel state in Walpole's Concorde on landing at LHR because in fact it was CRITICAL. It was a requirement that something like 10,000kgs of fuel was on board at landing to avoid a massive change in the CofG. In this case the fuel was much lower than that and it would have sat on its tail if it had gone all the way to the gate and had to be re-fuelled first. The last moments of that flight could have been very serious indeed.
As a matter of fact FL, myself and another PPRuNer were given an incredible insight into the incident by one of Corcorde's Captain's on a table that was a scale version of the runway at CDG. It was a very bad incident but VERY bad luck - nothing else.
Edit: I am prompted to say that the tyre piece that hit the tank did NOT rupture it. But it did set up a pressure wave in the fuel that did! Apologies.