Commercial aircraft wheels and their associated hardware are NDT inspected more often than any other aircraft component. Wheels experience continual dynamic loads, impact forces, and stresses during both take-offs and landings. They are also subjected to extreme environmental conditions both on the ground and at altitude. The wheel manufacturers continue to optimize the design of the wheels as best as possible, but failures do still occur and repetitive nature of a wheel’s exposure to these conditions can eventually lead to high cycle fatigue, corrosion, material property issues and various types of structural damage.

All of these issues have placed aircraft wheels into an aggressive and cyclic NDT inspection protocol and wheel’s potential for failure has led manufacturers to require various repetitive inspections at regular intervals. The intervals are different for each wheel type, but in general, tires are required to be removed at “X” number of landings and at these tire changes, the wheels are subjected to inspection. For larger commercial aircraft wheels, this interval is as little as 200 landings. In addition to the landing’s requirement, the wheels also have two different types of inspection regimes. These are named minor repair and major overhaul. In general, there will be 4 to 5 minor repairs performed before a major overhaul is performed. The minor repair is where the tire is removed, but the associated hardware remains assembled. The overhaul is a major repair and at this stage all hardware and even the paint is removed. Each of these intervals comes with a different set of NDT requirements, with the repair having much less access to inspectable areas and the full range of components of interest.