While car tires are all about the finer points of traction and resistance to hydroplaning, the best we can hope for with airplane tires is that theyll make it through a couple of annuals. To do that, they need a lot of tread depth, the right rubber compound and a pilot whose idea of making the first turnoff doesnt involve landing with the brakes locked. Heat is hard on tires, but landings chew up the rubber so to find out which tire is top dog, we conducted the second Great Florida Tire Death Match, subjecting each of 11 new tires to 300 blistering, rubber-burning simulated touchdowns on a flat stretch of I-75. Conclusion? He with the most tread wins, and that would be the Goodyear Flight Custom III. In this case, “wins” means delivers the most landings for the money-in other words, the best value. But that doesnt mean the most expensive tire is always the best choice for every owner. More on that later, but first, on to the tests. 
If most of your flying is from A to B, you probably don’t do many landings, even if each “landing” might be labeled a series of controlled collisions. For many owners, tire replacement is more about age- weather-related cracking, for example-than it is tread wear. Still, smearing rubber on the runway is what its all about so we dug out our test rig, mounted it on the trailer, bought a sample of most 6.00 X 6 new tires and tubes and got busy.
As shown here, the rig consists of a pneumatically operated pivoting arm mounted on a utility trailer towed by a pickup truck. The arm is activated by a valve-call it an air-powered gear selector-that reasonably simulates a retractable gear airplane by allowing a tire touchdown and retraction about every six seconds.
When we conducted these tests four years ago, we simulated 200 landings, but this time we upped the ante to 300, albeit with a slightly lighter weight load on the trailer. We also skipped the skid destruction test, which involved a mounted wheel and tire touched down at 30 MPH on a closed runway. We wanted to know how the tires dealt with this abuse. Some did, some didnt.
Of the 11 tires tested in 2004, we rated six as unserviceable after the skid test. There wasnt much to gain from repeating it this year, so for our 2008 edition, we substituted a two-mile taxi test at 30 MPH to test heat buildup. We measured the tires temperature before and after the taxi test and from there, we went right into the simulated landings. We also simulated a faster landing, at between 65 and 70 MPH, instead of 55 MPH or so in 2004. We chose this speed to better approximate