Narrative:

On walk around; the number 1 tire looked a little low to me; so I had the first officer check it. He said it could be or maybe not; so we wrote it up to have the air checked in the tire. It came back that there was 95 pounds in the tire; which should be at 200 pounds; so the inboard and outboard tires needed to be replaced according to maintenance. Since they took the tire gauges off of the tires it is impossible to know what the tire pressure actually is unless you write up the plane. Also; the inboard tire will support the aircraft enough to give you a false impression of what a low tire really looks like. I talked with maintenance and they said that tire pressure was checked on their #3 checks; which are every 70 hours of flight time; so it could go a while before the problem is found. There should be some way to know the tire pressure other than a visual check; because it may look ok to one pilot and not to another; especially on a light plane.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: An A319 flight crew could not agree whether a main gear tire pressure appeared to be low.

Narrative: On walk around; the number 1 tire looked a little low to me; so I had the First Officer check it. He said it could be or maybe not; so we wrote it up to have the air checked in the tire. It came back that there was 95 LBS in the tire; which should be at 200 LBS; so the inboard and outboard tires needed to be replaced according to Maintenance. Since they took the tire gauges off of the tires it is impossible to know what the tire pressure actually is unless you write up the plane. Also; the inboard tire will support the aircraft enough to give you a false impression of what a low tire really looks like. I talked with Maintenance and they said that tire pressure was checked on their #3 checks; which are every 70 hours of flight time; so it could go a while before the problem is found. There should be some way to know the tire pressure other than a visual check; because it may look ok to one pilot and not to another; especially on a light plane.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.