"John Godwin" wrote in message
...
"Peter Dohm" wrote in
:

In the case of light plane tires, I agree with you that really dry
air should work well enough to make the issue trivial. But, if
you need nitrogen for any other reason, it is the cheapest thing
that I know of in an L bottle or larger and using it in the tires
may be essentially free--because you may have to pay rental on the
tanks if they are not refilled at a prescribed interval.

My daughter is a Crew Chief on a C-130 Herc and said that Nitrogen is
used in the struts.

--

I'm sure that they use nitrogen in the tires as well--even though they run
at less than half of the pressure of a lot of the heavy jets--it just makes
sense to use it when you have it available.

Getting back to the original subject of whether nitrogen behaves in a manner
more like an "ideal gas" than air, aside from the issue of reactivity, the
answer is yes--especially as pressure is increased and/or temperature is
decreased. Basically, it is relatively easy to have nitrogen that is
extremely dry because it it normally dispensed from the top of a very high
pressure storage bottle--with the result that nearly all of any water vapor
and/or CO2 that is in the bottle will be left in a condensed form at the
bottom of the bottle.