Air Canada Flight 33
Airbus A340-300 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure during takeoff
From Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) to Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX03IA259
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Airbus A340-300
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A340
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- C-FYKX
- Operator
- Air Canada
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL), Honolulu, HITo Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD), Sydney
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 129: Foreign
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Takeoff · roll/run
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Landing gear, tire › Failure, total
- Landing gear, tire › Low pressure
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Both of the transport airplane's center landing gear tires (#'s 9 and 10) shredded during takeoff roll, damaging the door retraction arms and multiple fuselage skin panels. The flight crew could not retract the landing gear and elected to return to the departure airport and performed an uneventful overweight landing. Examination of the tire debris revealed there was significant inter ply tearing of the tires, suggesting the tire did not fail as a result of a cap failure. According to the operator and tire manufacturer, the failure signatures were consistent with a rapid and violent event, which can be attributed either to foreign object damage (FOD) or a low tire pressure situation. Since the #10 tire exhibited high heat signatures, the likely sequence is that the #9 wheel tire failed first, followed by the overheating of the #10 tire and its subsequent failure. The fact that no FOD was recovered with the tire debris and the fact that the nose tires did not sustain any damage, considering their in-line position with the center landing gear, lends more credence to the low tire pressure situation. The airplane underwent a regularly scheduled service check, which included a tire condition and pressure check, approximately 30 hours prior to the event. The tire pressure was not documented during the service check. A post-incident examination revealed the #9 wheel had a leaking fuse plug. The fuse plug was tested and found to have a 6-psi leak over a 12-hour time period. The pre-incident tire pressure was unknown.
Probable cause
the failure of the center landing gear tires as a result of low tire pressure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX03IA259
- Event ID
- 20030827X01414
- Case number
- LAX03IA259
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a32a90d7f9128bb002dac080355838e76982657b9914d5af54792aba990d44cd; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:41:57.677Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for C-FYKX; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.