A Qantas flight had to turn back due to a tire which exploded after takeoff. For those of us of a certain age, this immediately brings back to mind the Ford/Firestone tire controversy. Most of you will be too young to remember the worst handled product failure in history, well, at least in automotive history. This controversy had the unfortunate timing of happening when the Concorde crashed after a tire exploded and trashed the wing on takeoff causing a fuel fireball.
The media hype of Ford trying to finger Firestone, not realizing that once the Ford logo went on the ride they were responsible for the entire ride. It inspired many an enterprising Photoshop user to create various images of the Concorde with Firestone tires on it.
I couldn’t find the one I remembered where they actually pasted the Firestone logo on the exploding tire. That one went around as a viral email with the subject line “We Found the Problem!” back in the day.
True, people and companies run tires long after they should have been replaced. I’ve seen more than one care in a parking lot with cords showing through.
Tires aren’t cheap and people want to believe they will last forever. Some of it is the “just put gas in it and go” mentality. For others they either A) don’t have any money or B) can’t manage the money they have so they claim to not have any money yet they can still go out to restaurants, bars and Starbucks. Encouraging this behavior is the fact tires have gotten exponentially better.
Can I kick the tires?
“Can I kick the tires?” is an expression which originated before vulcanization was discovered. Tires were made of soft rubber and would easily blowout. You could really cause a blowout by kicking the tire. Any kind of road hazard, pot hole, glass bottle, etc. could cause both a blowout and an accident.
While much of the world is still talking about the Boeing 737 and its fatal flight control system, we should take a moment to thank FAA regulators as well as the the hardware engineers who design the cages around where the landing gear rides in a plane. According to what I read, that tire blew out after the gear was stowed and it didn’t take out the plane. Not only that, the plane managed to land without the tire.
Odds are this story will turn out to be a lack of maintenance. Hopefully it won’t devolve into the Ford/Firestone tire controversy.
