Incident: Delta B763 blew tyre on takeoff
 

http://avherald.com/h?article=43d9325b&opt=0

Why did the crew continue to GRU flying 10 hours with a blew tyre to a very distant airport instead of returning?

Let's see,

1/ Did not want to do a heavy weight, fully laden with fuel, landing with a blown tire.

2/ No other damage, so no immediate need to land.

3/ Crew did not know it was blown. Unable to link, so the answer to this one maybe in link

4/ Having had a blown tire, I can assure you landing at normal weight at the destination is better than a heavy weight landing at the departure point. Yes, they might have been able to dump fuel, but what for?

Youtube video
 

I presume this was the link intended. Speaking as a (now retired) maintenance man, I am unclear why md-100 thought the aircraft should return. Surely, Sao Paulo would have been just as capable as Detroit at handling the incident, so safety would not have been compromised. The passengers arrived at their destination without extra delay, fuel was not wasted, and the aircraft was correctly positioned. I guess there was a risk of brake unit damage, but I would expect there to be spares at Sao Paulo. Leg damage was a possibility, I suppose, but I would have been very surprised had that happened.

Bit out of turn expressing an opinion here, I suppose. I am well past my sell-by date.

Difficult to be certain of that - tyre flail can cause all sorts of damage which might not be immediately obvious. If the cause of the failure wasn't positively known, there would be some possibility of another tyre failing inside the undercarriage bay later in flight.

Which caused a fatal accident in (I think) a Swissair Caravelle years ago - and an RAF VC10 lost 2 engines when a tyre exploded insie the undercarriage bay, damaging the LP cocks.

Was it wise to continue for another 10 hours? I'm not sure that it was.

The hell with 'fuel waste' or 'delayed passengers' - if your aircraft has suffered a tyre explosion and the extent of the damage isn't known, it might be preferable to leave the undercarriage extended, burn off (or dump if available) and land as soon as practicable?

This scenario is discussed in the Boeing FCTM. There is no definite answer (as with most situations we may encounter), but they pretty much did what Mr. Boeing tells them to do.

Good call, IMHO.

From the Boeing FCTM:

Tragic, but rather self inflicted.

Swissair Flight 306 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"manifest"
 

when i was in the back seat and then the right seat of a three man aircraft, i made it a point to learn from every flightcrew's reaction to every event we encountered. one very good captain, now with atlas cargo, had a philosopy of waiting til the possible malfunction would "manifest itself"

yes we are to use our hopefully indepth systems knowledge and wide read knowledge of all the aviation incidents/accidents/causes-effects-results to our individual minds' abilities to imagine all the possible ramifications of any malfunction that we experience. but to let our imagination go free range without any manifest evidence is not any safer that a conscientious continuation of the flight as planned until some other "damage" does clearly display itself.

i don't know the route taken, but if the captain proceeded knowing that there were alternate airports with sufficient runways and services to deal with whatever might come up, and basically using the fuel to produce distance while reducing the weight in case a landing was needed, there is nothing unsafe about that.

perhaps he/she did consider all the possible reduced stopping capability-possible flap/hydraulic and other second stage effects all along the route and especially at the proposed destination. being delta i would be very surprized if they did not communicate with ground mx-operations-maybe even other pilots on the company frequency and get second, third opinions. i would. perhaps he/she configured early on the approach, cautiously watching each flap and gear event and feeling of the aircraft flight controls. very few things can happen to reduce safety that will not make some manifest display of one sort of the other if carefully observed.

he/she was there, not i and the lack of significant event is evidence enough that the correct thought process was followed and executed.

Stop being coy. The captain decided to accept the risk of possible unknown damage (his choice) and by so doing saved his company heaps of money. A good company man at heart.

How did the guy end up filming this? Just lucky? Or was this a notable flight for some other reason. :confused:

A naive question: Is it easy to notice on the flight deck right when a tire blows? Are there pressure sensors that detect this or just by the handling on the runway.

Retraction
 

It appears that they postponed gear retraction. So maybe they knew right away that there was something wrong. Could be through tire pressure, maybe through tower/ATC.

You have to land anyway, so good decision to continue and land with less weight and less fuel. The decision that comes before that decision is whether you should retract. Because retracting a blown tire can damage the interiors of the wheel well. Due to debris or do to hight temperatures/ wheel well fire.

consider
 

We had three cases where the protector (tread) ripped from the tire on B378. With most cases it was just damage to the trailing edge flaps but could have been easily worse. The repairs were very financialy demaning... But consider that the tread around 160 kts is round 1000G's! and the kinetic energy is massive (like a golf ball at speed of sound). After V1 you have to consider the route, wx, etc... basically it comes down to pilot's airman ship.

Great vid, thanks for sharing.

I actually thought there are systems that doesnt allow the gear to be retracted if the tire is blown... any one?

BEagle - never worked on Caravelle. Did on the RAF VC10 - as a deputy shift boss on the flight line. Never say anything like that damage from a burst tyre. Never saw reports of the incident. OK, I was on that flight line for 18 months only - but I think I would have seen something on it unless the incident happened after the early 90s. Of course aircraft layout can affect things - notoriously did so for the Concorde.

I wouldn't retract the gear either. If the temps were right up - as you would expect them to be - getting the Dunlops out of the air flow at that stage is asking for a well fire. Not to mention that they maybe distorted or hanging rubber, which might jam the gear up. Far too many possible bad scenarios to risk retraction. A bad call in my mind.
As for tyre pressure, the 767 does indicate this on the status page (bottom EICAS).
THE 757 ONLY TEMP....

http://www.smartcockpit.com/data/pdf...d_Avionics.pdf

Page 113

kiwibrit, it was a 10 Sqn aircraft in the late 1990s (I think?) flying from Scotland to Brize Norton. A worn tyre was thought to be capable of 'one more landing', it wasn't and exploded in the undercarriage bay during flight. The crew made a safe 2-engined landing at Brize, but a lot of fuel was seen to be leaking out of the damaged wing.

An abandonment on the RW was initiated NOT by the captain; the first he knew of it was when he saw people running past.....

The fuel stain stayed on the runway for quite a while.

The Caravelle was Swissair Flight 306, a bit of pilot-induced failure. Illustrates the problem of retracting damaged gear, though - and you never know why the tyre blew. Were the brakes "grabbing" for the taxi out - overheating the tyre? Who knows?

So, having said that - they retracted the gear as normal, and without knowledge of the failure (which is normal for an aircraft of this size). Contacted some time later about the tyre debris - you have already retracted the gear, and been monitoring the performance for some time ...

50:50 call, I reckon.

Thanks for the confirmation, Checkboard.

I reckon if they knew they'd had a tyre burst on take-off, they should have left the undercarriage extended, burned off (or dumped fuel) and returned. But if they didn't know until someone told them later on, then that would have been a different matter.

As page 111 of the document you cite indicates, tire pressure indication is an option on the '76. Not sure whether the Deltoids have it or not.

coy?
 

That's imaginative indeed. Perhaps a better word-phrase would be "non-judgmental of an event
I did not experience"
What can have gone wrong that would not manifest itself somewhere along
a time line?
Perhaps the safest path would be stay in bed?