Someone’s getting fired at Ben Gurion Airport (Delta plane loses a wheel, brake parts on takeoff from Israel | The Times of Israel).
So ground radar picks up debris as it’s supposed to (such a radar I never knew existed), but someone forgot to check the dryer, as they say in Hollywood.
The Delta pilots of the plane never noticed anything amiss? And no auto system alerted them? Seems to me the information could come in handy at the end of the flight.
It sounds like they were told mid flight. As for noticing it when it happened, I guess it didn’t make a loud enough thump.
The article says that there was a warning but it was dismissed as a false alarm (the article may have been updated since it was first posted).
Depends entirely on when it happens in the takeoff roll. Unlike a car, the brake assembly is a modular unit that can be easily removed after the wheel/tire is.
So depending on what broke when, the wheel/tire could depart the aircraft with zero alarms, and no detectible vibration. And no collateral damage. The brake coming off next would tear open a couple hydraulic hoses, but those are equipped with fuses that seal off the leak before more than a cup or so of fluid are lost. And that from a system with many gallons of fluid.
The brake departing would also trigger an alarm that the antiskid system detects a fault. Which alarm would be suppressed until after they were well airborne. But those faults happen for no good reason every now and then. Coincidentally I had one a couple weeks ago, although my previous antiskid alert was a few years ago. There’s enough redundancy in the antiskid systems that there are several levels of warning and fallback before the system is totally failed. And even that is not a crisis given a reasonably long non-snowy runway.
My employer had something similar happen 3 or 5 years ago on a domestic transcon. A wheel/tire though not brake came off during takeoff and went off the end of the runway still doing ~75mph. It went through a couple fences, across a road, and came to rest embedded in the side of a concrete block warehouse. Fortunately nobody nearby was hurt.
The first the crew knew was when they got a message from HQ 2 hours later after the wheel/tire had been found and traced back to their particular aircraft.
Landing was, of course, completely uneventful. There are 4 or 6 tires on those trucks for a reason. One of those reasons is redundancy. The loss of any one is no big deal.
Where this can get sporty is situations where the tire or wheel disintegrates while still attached to the axle. The massive centrifugal forces can throw debris hard enough to puncture wings or sever hydraulic and mechanical linkages in the gear well area. The consequences of that can potentially get real ugly. Here’s the limit case: Air France Flight 4590 - Wikipedia
ATC were alerted and dismissed it as a false alarm, but apparently the crew were told later in the flight after the debris had been found on the runway.
Yeah, the flight in question took off around midnight local time, and takes about 11.5 hours to get to JFK. In some sense, it’s a lucky thing that this happened on a long international flight; if the flight had been shorter, the debris might not have been discovered before the plane attempted to land.
ETA: LSLGuy notes that landing with one missing wheel probably wouldn’t have been disastrous, but I would assume the pilots would still rather know that they’re missing a wheel than not know.