2023-05 · NASA ASRS report 2004576
Cessna 172 flight crew reported a runway excursion due to a left brake failure during landing rollout. No damage to aircraft or airport equipment.
Went out for flight lesson working on emergency and flight maneuvers with flight instructor. Everything went just fine and was normal. Came back in to ZZZ for touch and go's on XXR; performed 2 of those with no issue. No brake use involved on those landings. Requested to jump over to XXL for a full stop. That was approved and we proceeded in a left traffic pattern to land XXL. Everything went normal without issue; came in and landed smoothly; approximately half way down the runway after touchdown I went to apply brakes to slow down to make a left turn at the end of the runway to taxiway. When I stepped on both brake pedals the left one went very soft and went to the floor but was not actually braking. Attempted 2 more times to double check. As this was taking place I had indicated the issue to CFI which he checked and immediately took over. Continued to slow down as much as possible and with only a right bake he was able to run maybe 10 ft. off the right side of the runway into the grass. He was able to split in between the runway lighting as to avoid them. We came to a complete stop and was immediately communicating with Tower. We were able to slowly make an approximately 180 top the right back onto the runway and off the end to Taxiway X. Tower had us stop and talked through the issue. It was felt that we could slowly roll back to hanger area to park.
My student had landed the Cessna 172N on XXL in ZZZ for a full stop; as we are rolling down the runway and slowing down to the departure end to exit off of X taxiway. Student noticed the left brake was not in effect/working to steer left onto the taxiway. I initiated my controls to slow us down adding back pressure on the elevator and trying to add both right and left brake. The right brake was the only one working and we slowly steered to the right off into the grass about 6 ft. off the runway. Doing my best to not add any damage to the prop and/or taxiway lights; I then was able to taxi it out of the grass and back onto the runway and exit onto Taxiway X. I was able to carefully steer straight down X back to the ramp where I filled out an incident report. Our mechanic is going to do an inspection on what caused the inability to steer/brake to the left.
Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.
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