Round, Black and Problematic

First there were big tires, like those on the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. I wasn't surprised that a 450,000-pound airplane needed huge tires. They made quite an impression. In fact they left me a little scarred too, as I remember. That was the first time I encountered the type of tire with metal bits or wires embedded in the rubber. You have to be careful around those things.

I had been in the B-52's rear section, the so-called "47 Section " aft of the main rear landing gear. Part of my preflight checks included crawling around in that dark equipment bay, looking for things that might be wrong with the electronic countermeasures gear. After completing that task I returned to the aft gear well and started to climb and jump down to the ramp.

Though I was wearing gloves, my hand wiped hard against one of those big tires whilst I attempted to stop from falling too hard. Suddenly I realized that the tire had sliced my hand, right through the glove. Boy, those embedded wires are sharp.

It wasn't until I'd removed my glove to check on my hand's condition that I took a good look at that landing gear tire than just bit me. The damage wasn't great, just a few scratches and blood streaks. I'd live. It was a lesson learned the hard way. Watch out for those tires with embedded wires.

And then there were those very little tires, the ones on the B-58 Hustler. It's hard to believe that a 160,000-pound airplane that roars down the runway at 200 knots before becoming airborne can do so on those tiny wheels and tires. After my days in B-52's with those huge tires, these B-58 tires are dinky. Maybe that's why we needed 18 of 'em, eight on each main and two more on the nose gear. And they were really high pressure types.

B-58 tires didn't wear very well. Sometimes they wouldn't even get us from the parking spot to the end of the runway. They were such a problem that we even had a ground crew follow us down the taxiways to check on the tires. If we got more than a landing or two on them, that was exceptional. But then having those small diameter tires spin up to 200 knot speeds on takeoff, not to mention skuffing badly on 180 knot touchdowns, would be rough on them.

We had to use small tires because there was no place in the wing wheelwells to put bigger ones. It was necessary to stop the tires from spinning after takeoff before they would fit inside the gear well. Centrifugal forces from high speed rotations cause the tires to expand substantially.

However, the littlest tires I got to know "up close and personal" were the 18-ply helicopter tires that "mysteriously" made there way onto my trusty Cushman motor scooter. They were so heavy, compared to the light two-ply standard ones normally used, that they wouldn't even let me turn the scooter unless I slowed down to barely a crawl. The gyroscopic effect of those 18-ply tires acted more like a stabilizer as I putt-putted down the flightline.