Why not make plane-tires spin, before landing?!

hi everybody you gotta welcome to mentor and you're not video podcast as always I hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video guys why is it that we don't have some kind of motors driving the landing gear wheels of an aircraft make sure that they spin up prior to landing how come that the tires can actually take that enormous amount of stress that is put upon it upon a hard landing for example and how much does it cost to change a tire [Music] this video is brought to you in cooperation with skill share now skill shares high quality learning community with thousands of courses and pretty much anything that you can imagine now course that I think that you guys would really enjoy is budget filmmaking with Mattie Brown and if you click this link here below you get two months of premium skill share absolutely for free so check it out [Music] Rika's so today I'm going to be talking about one of the most common questions that I get whenever I talk about aircraft landing on a show landing or whatever it is it always comes up and that is I will see this huge clouds of smoke coming up when an aircraft land that must be you know we wearing down the tires really quickly why don't you just make sure the tires start spinning to make sure that you don't get that cloud of smoke coming off wouldn't that be a good idea great so I'm going to give you a couple of different reasons why we don't have motors fitted to the the aircraft tires but first of all I want to start with talking about the tires in themselves so aircraft tires are fantastic pieces of technology in itself they are able to take the pressure that comes from coming in with a 65 tonne aircraft landing at 260 km/h 22.04.2012 but it's very rare and the fact is that the technology that comes in to making an aircraft tire is fascinating there are not too many aircrafts tire manufacturers around maybe a handful and the reason for that is because of this technology it takes years and years to perfect it and it has to be certified to be almost foolproof so it takes a special compound of rubber that you will never hear that the the tire manufacturers will I will tell you about but it's special rubber involved they are reinforced with steel nylon and even aluminium threads to make sure that they keep their form and you would also notice that while if you're looking at a our tire for example you'd see that the car tire that this structure is kind of divided into different blocks you won't see that on an aircraft tire you will just see that they're kind of grooved and the reason for that is that car tires truck tires for example they need to be able to take side forces as you are maneuvering down a road you need to be able to take curbs not really the case with aircraft the aircraft just need to be able to land and stop on a straight run but the grooves needs to be there in order to anticipate the water so we're landing on a wet runway for example or even to a certain extent flooded runway we need to be able to to try to get rid of or not to be subject to aqua planning very important but how are they inflated then well the aircraft tires are inflated to an incredible pressure the normal pressure inside of a 737 tires about 200 psi to give that into perspective that's about twice as much as a truck tire and about six times as much as the pressure that you have inside of your your average car yeah what else yes they're not inflated using pressurized air like you would do when you go to the to refill your car tire they are inflated using nitrogen and the reason that they use nitrogen is because it's an inert gas that means that it's not you know it doesn't change much when it comes to pressure if the temperature changes or if the pressure suddenly changes it's basically doesn't react much and that's very important because if you think about it when we are taxiing out an aircraft it might be up to 35 degrees Celsius outside now as we taxi along the we will probably stopping at given times will be slowing down and every time that we use our brakes the energy from our brakes is transferred into the brake discs they become hot and they're very close to the gear so tires can be heated up and then as we take off retract the gears we come up to our cruising altitude we have a temperature outside of about minus 60 degrees Celsius stay there for a few hours inside of the tires will down to sixty degrees then we come down land we start braking hard because it's a short runway you will get almost glowing brake discs which means that the tire are now heated up suddenly this is why we have nitrogen inside of them to make sure that these sudden changes in both pressure as we climb in the Sun and temperature as we climb in the sand and then start braking it doesn't affect the the overall performance of the tires all right cool now to the main question why don't we fit motors some kind of motors either well gas driven or driven on electrics to the landing gear well basically there are two different reasons why we would do that okay the first one is actually maneuvering the aircraft when were on the ground so theoretically there's no need to use jet engines to you know get the aircraft taxiing along on the taxi lines we could have a motor driving the aircraft on the ground and then get us to the holding point start the jet engines up and then take off using the jet engines now this is actually a very good point and this is something that I feel quite passionate about myself yes it is very very wasteful to use jet engines to be taxing around on the ground as an example when we calculate a normal flight on average we use about 200 kilos of fuel for taxi and that's just to get yourself out to the runway and get herself back to the gate after landing two hundred kilos of fuel that's two months of you using a normal car just for one aircraft 177 to do one flight that could be done using other means but is it really smart to use the aircraft own tires for that its own motors think about it at the moment it already exists electrical talks we have them here in Girona we have electrically driven tugs why don't we invent or use a tog that can be remote-controlled from outside or from inside of the cockpit use that tog to push us back from the gate and then the pilots will be able to you know maneuver it connected to the nose gear up to the holding point press a button which would release the talk the talk will then be able to using autonomy which we already have the technology for drive back through some kind of side road back to the gate and then here we use for the next aircraft this technology already exists and it will do all of these things that we just talked about but without having to re-engineer the aircraft without having to add any technology onto the aircraft itself although the technology would be in the talk which means that all of the maintenance to the talk the recharging of the talk all of that will be done on the ground where there's not so much stringent rules about it and there's no risk to the aircraft so that's the first thing that people are saying the second thing that people are saying and this by the way is the most common thing is that why don't why don't you put motors on the the wheels so they start spinning before we touch down on the runway that way you will have much less wear and tear on the no on the on the tires well from the onset that looks like an excellent idea yeah why is that you know it would make all the sense in the world to do that but then you have to start thinking about what could go wrong with that so first of all I'm gonna give you three different reasons why this is not a good idea so the first thing is the actual fitting of new technology to the existing gear so you would have to create come up with a foolproof well not a foolproof but a very close to foolproof electrical motor that will be running the tires and they need to be strong enough to get the tires up to the speeds that we're talking about so 260 to 300 kilometers per hour they need to spawn them up to that now if it's an electrical engine that does this it has to be connected to batteries and those batteries if they are connected to the engine also the motor itself is going to be very close to our fuel banks which are in the wings and in the central part of the aircraft now putting batteries especially large batteries onto aircraft comes with it own risk we saw that in the 787 development you know when the 787 we just released it has some huge problems with batteries batteries is an issue this adding of this is going to also add to the overall weight of the aircraft and as I've been explaining before in channel when you add weight to the aircraft it's going to burn more fuel and if that is you know a lot of weight for a lot of time that might actually negate the economical benefit of getting the tires to move in the first place so that's number one just adding the technology to the gear number two is as always getting it certified so as I was alluding to before since it comes with potential risks he would have to be certified by the FAA by the CAA by yatha all of these regular regulatory bodies would have to come in and make sure that this is safe under any circumstance right when they operate when they don't operate all of it and that is going to take years and it's gonna cost a lot of money money to do but number three the single biggest reason is why this is very very hard to do and probably undoable is the safety aspect of it it's how we're controlling the aircraft during landing so when you add new technology to an aircraft you always need to assume that that technology might fail okay so if we will be coming in the landing with an aircraft and we had motors that are now spinning up the tires 260 kilometers first of all they need to match exactly the speed of the aircraft that's a problem because we are landing in windy conditions with hard winds tailwind crosswinds this the ground speed that were landing with is going to change very very quickly and the tires need to be able to accommodate these speed changes if they don't we are going to have potentially more speed and one tire than the other and you'll have controllability issues that's number one number two is what about if one of the motors fails you now have one motor spinning it 300 km/h the under alder tire is not when we touch down there's gonna be huge difference between the two so you might get the aircraft suddenly wearing to one side which is not something you want on a 45 meter wide runway number three we are very very often coming in landing with what we call at crab angle you will have seen that on YouTube videos when the aircraft comes in and it looks like they have an angle towards the runway it's very very similar to trying to to drive a boat across a river from one point to the other you're gonna need to put an angle towards the stream of the river in order to reach that exact point and we do the same when we're coming into the crosswind landing now during the last part of the flare we tend to put bit of rudder in to align ourselves with the runway but if it's a slippery runway or a wet runway or if the cross one is too strong we are actually going to land with a bit of that crab in so that means that we're landing with an angle towards the runway that puts some a lot of pressure on the landing gear right but there is torque functionality in the landing gear which allows us to do this so that we land get a bit of a jolt and then we liner self at the centerline and we continue rolling down the runway if you would have the aircraft having spinning wheels and we're landing with a net with an angle you would have a different problem now you have something that's actually driving the aircraft off the runway which is actively pushing the aircraft off the runway so you would have to be able to land without the crab angle or with a very small crab angle in order to be able to do that so all of these factors combined makes it very very unlikely that you would we ever be able to see an aircraft coming in with spinning tires okay and on top of that you have the economical factors here so changing a tire tire we have four main tires on the 737 you have two nose gear tires changing a main tire on the cemetery seven cost about $1500 like a new tire it's about $1,500 and while that might sound like a lot of money actually if you compare it to just a normal tire that you buy for your car the difference is not that astronomical right which would lead you to believe that in the world of aviation where money flows in huge streams it's not that big of a deal and on top of that a tire would last for about three to five hundred cycles right - three to five hundred takeoff the landings so that's that's quite a lot actually and we can also rethread the tire up to four or five times and that's significantly cheaper than just buying a new tire so if you take those factors into account the fact that we are landing and you do get that little kind of cloud of blue smoke coming off it just means that yeah there's a bit of wear or tear on the the tire it will be replaced not that big of a deal just like you are probably not thinking too much about the cost of the tires of your car it's there it does cost money yes but it's not huge just to give you a little bit of a comparison if we would have a bird strike into an engine which happens regularly and that would actually Bend one just one of the fan blades to change one fan blade is about fifty thousand dollars okay if you'd have to change an engine on an aircraft it's about twelve million dollars to do so these are the normal count of money that that airlines are used to pay when it comes to maintenance $1,500 is very little when it come to that it is very little even if you compare to the fuel costs of the of the aircraft so all of these things combined makes it very unlikely as an SI almost surely impossible that you will ever see this technology ever being fitted to an aircraft okay now guys the fact that you are sitting here watching this video asking these kind of questions makes me believe that you are probably the curious type the type that wants to learn and this is why I am so happy to have Skillshare as a sponsor of this episode now as I said in the beginning Skillshare have thousands of high quality video courses and pretty much any subject that you can imagine but of course that I think that you guys would really enjoy is a budget filmmaking with Mattie Brown all right I get a lot of questions from this channel about what kind of I'm using what kind of lighting and audio I'm using but what he will be showing you is that it's less about the equipment and more about your technique and your passion about filmmaking you can do great things just using your iPhone if you know how to do it and if you know how to edit it and that's what he will show you so if you 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Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 768,731

Rating: 4.7937274 out of 5

Keywords: landing gear, how to become a pilot, flight school, boeing 737, mentour pilot, spinning aircraft tires, tech insider, boeing 737 max, airplane tires, landing gear failure, pilot life, mentour pilot turbulence, mentour pilot 737 max, mentour pilot hard landing, landing gear sound, fear of flying, nervous flier, how to become a pilot in usa, pilot lifestyle, virtual reality 360, boeing 737-800, boeing 737 landing, airbus a380, landing gear close up, boeing 737ng

Id: AJRf1jDiaXw

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019