A fellow at the hangar was beating the tires on his Cessna310 with a bright orange stick. What's up with that?

Question

Good looking airplane, by the way.

Answer 1

It's called a tire knocker, (some other's I won't mention,) among others. You can do it with almost anything; I've used hammers, big maglites, ratchet handles, box end wrenches and failing that, the biggest crescent wrench I could find. It's also a felony in certain places to be caught in your car with one in hand's reach.

It's sort of like tapping on the side of a drum to find the liquid level; you're trying to find a certain sound or feel, if the sound is a little dull and the rebound seems anemic, you have a low tire.

The number of pilots that have an accurate tire guage in their flight bag, from my experience, seems to be a bit small. People that do what I did and buy an expensive, calibratable guage, find that it inexplicably disappears in the presence of spouses, childgren, roommates, hangarmates, mechanics and ramp rats.

A good, oil filled guage is something that's very aggressively tracked by the parts guy that signed it out because it's a pain in the butt to replace or get calibrated. You also only typically encounter nice, oil filled guages when you're dealing with jets that require much higher landing gear tire pressures than you would with the 310.

The down side is that you can be arrested for having a sawed off broom handle with a layer of lead wrapped around one end. The upside is that everyone assumes you're an idiot and stays away from your flight bag and airplane.

Answer 2

It's called a tire buddy.
Shortcut instead of checking the tire pressure.
A filled tire gives a certain sound and bounce as compared to a tire out of air.
Truckers do the same.

Answer 3

Just part of the preflight check, didn't want to try to land with a flat or low tire.

Answer 4

Same reason truck drivers do it on their tires. Checking for flats and low air pressure.

Answer 5

Checking the air pressure? or just making sure they wont move?? lol.