Eleven tires suffered the rubber burning torture of 200 landings and locked wheel tests.

by Paul Bertorelli and Peter Cole

Most owners replace a tire or two during the annual, when the airplane is up on jacks and a sharp-eyed mechanic will notice what you don’t: the tire tread is unevenly worn and somewhere around the circumference, it’ll be gone entirely. The cost of the tire and the labor to install it will be buried somewhere in the invoice. (For our last tire—a Condor—the total came to $130.03, nearly evenly split between the cost of the tire and the labor to install it.) …