Jerry Dixon

Here’s another interesting story from one of our top aviation news scouts, Jerry Dixon (L), a retired USMC pilot, El Paso Daedalian, and a long-time FASF member.

We’ve all seen large commercial airliners touch down on runways across the world, and when those multiple tire trucks of their landing gears hit the runway pavement you always see a black or gray cloud of burning rubber smoke.  That’s of course the rubber being heatedly burned off of the wheels, which usually hit the runway at over 150 MPH from not rotating at all.  Rather than write up this entire daily airport occurrence, we’ll just embed a short (less than 5 minutes) video Jerry found that explains the entire ‘rubber burned onto runways’ problem.

  Why 10,000 pounds of rubber daily are stripped from some runways

• Rubber builds up on airport runways and runway lights every time a plane’s wheels touch down.
• The rubber that coats the pavement and lights is a safety hazard that must be removed regularly.
• Companies like Blastrac have specific processes for removing the rubber.