ABSTRACT: For modeling an aircraft tire using the brush model method, the friction coefficient μ between rubber and asphalt should not only be described in terms of the applied pressure and sliding velocity/slip ratio, but also by local temperature inside the contact area. Its influence cannot be neglected, since it leads to significant material property changes. Therefore, investigations on different test rigs are analyzed using thermal recordings of an infrared camera. First measurements are done on a high speed linear tester (HiLiTe), a test rig at the Institute of Dynamics and Vibration Research (IDS) at Leibniz University Hanover, Germany. It allows testing single tread block samples with a constant slip ratio of 100%, that is, pure sliding, on a variety of surfaces such as dry and wet asphalt or concrete, as well as on snow and ice. Results in this paper show that the convection has a smaller impact on tread block cooling than the actual contact between runway surface and sample. Since colder surfac...