projecthabu:This A-12 #06938 was covered in a previous post. Click here to view.     A-12 #06938, on

projecthabu:This A-12 #06938 was covered in a previous post. Click here to view.     A-12 #06938, on display at the USS Alabama Battleship Museum, is shown along side a pristine J-58 engine with less than an hour test run time, and a very worn landing gear tire. Because the landing gear had to fit in such a low aspect ratio wing, they had to be extremely compact. For the small landing gear to support the enormous landing weight of the 52,000 lb aircraft, the tires were inflated to 415 Psi with nitrogen. Comparatively, your car tires are probably inflated to somewhere around 40 Psi.     The skin of the aircraft heated up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit in flight. To keep the tires from melting, they were constructed from aluminium powder and latex, which gave the tires their distinctive silver color. If the tires were pressurized with air, they would have exploded under such intense heating. Thus, the tires are inflated with nitrogen.     Because of the high tire pressure, if the aircraft ran over any debris, the tire would cut rather than give. This had the potential to cause a mission abort before the aircraft even left the ground. To avoid tire damage, a car driven by the mobile crew (backup crew) preceded the aircraft everywhere it went on the ground searching for FOD (foreign object debris). It drove along the taxi way in front of the aircraft and down the length of the takeoff roll down the runway runway before each flight. Regardless, each tire was replaced after just 10 flights. Each tire cost $2,000.     The final two photos in the set were shot with my cell phone camera. It’s important to remember that the photographer makes the photo. Not the camera. -- source link
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