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Originally posted by trapper189:

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Originally posted by joel9507:

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Originally posted by HRK:

Not obvious to this layman what triggered that.

Guy is filling the tire with air. You can see the coiled air hose in the bottom right quadrant of the tire and then later flying in the air vertically after the wheel lets loose. The wheel is two pieces bolted together and lets loose because some part of it failed. It happens enough that the standard safety procedure is to inflate those assemblies in a cage.

Yep, and it looks like two people knew better than to hang around, and the older guy in the jacket is walking away probably getting ready to say something like " hey dumbass, get your foot off that or it will take your leg off" then "kablammo!"

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Originally posted by alreadydead:
Sincerely, would someone explain the danger of 'split rim' vs the rim that is on the tires on my car.

There are (at least) two types of split rims.

On older trucks and some older trailers the rim is three pieces, the main piece has one side similar to the rim on your car, the other side basically a flat tube parallel to the bottom of the valley in your rim between the two sides which has a groove in it, a second piece is the other side which slides over the “barrel” of the first piece after the tire is installed, the third piece is a spring steel ring / retaining clip that goes into the groove on the first piece, retaining the second piece. Failure to get this “clip” properly seated or failure of this “clip” has caused some horrific accidents. A lot of tire store refuse to work on this type of split rim at all. Anyone who works on these without a cage might as well place Russian Roulette.

On “little” airplanes, the wheels are made up of two castings (I think usually aluminum, but maybe magnesium sometimes) that are literally half of the wheel held together by bolts. I don’t remember if it is four or six bolts holding the wheels on the Travel Air together. Three wheels, max gross weight for the aircraft 4400 pounds. I can’t swear that the bolts are 1/4”, but I’d be shocked if they were any bigger than 5/16”. Of course, those tires run around 30 psi. I still wouldn’t want to touch one of those nuts without removing the valve stem core and pushing at least one side of the tire off the bead.

I don’t know what type of split rims are used on bigger airplanes. They may be scaled up versions of the little airplane tires or they may be something different. Regardless of how they’re designed/built, if they are allowed to come apart with pressure in the tire, it isn’t going to be pretty.

ETA: In HRK’s second (“Why you use a cage”) video, this is clearly the first type described above. You can clearly see the first piece described with the barrel on the right side as the video plays. In the first video (Dude takes a ride) I can’t tell for sure, but I think it is also the same type rather than the bolted halves type.