Hi,
I’m having problems with the brakes on a 172 Skyhawk after landing. After touchdown, the brakes don’t seem to work in career mode (I haven’t tested this in free mode yet).
As a result, I often overrun the runway, sometimes crashing or receiving a message about overspeeding. This ruins my performance rating every time.
Has anyone else experienced this issue, or am I doing something wrong?
I haven’t had a problem with the brakes on the 172.
Just to see if it’s actually a brake binding issue and not that you are coming in to hot, try setting the parking brake on in the air before landing and see if that stops you.
Otherwise the default binding for brakes is ‘Space’ now, so try holding down the spacebar after you touch down.
Yeah, I had the same exact problem a moment ago with my Trustmaster TFRP.
I saw (visually) that my brakes in the sim were applied, but nothing happened with my speed…
The C172’s brakes are significantly less effective than in MSFS 2020 particularly on grass. Ground handling in general is dramatically better however.
Sometimes I have had major problems stopping - sometimes no doubt due to landing too fast.
Maybe they are modelling overheating, or it could be linked to the new damage system, certainly for owned aircraft.
The breaks work fine before taking off. I will give it a try to set the parking brake before landing. Yes, I tried to land on grass.
Are you using the C172 Classic (steam gauges) or the C172 G1000 ?.
The C172 G1000.
I tried it again with the parking brake on in the air. I think it worked better. I also set the flaps to 10% and 20%, but I got a message that I overspeeded with my flaps. I was at about 70 kt. Maybe there’s another bug.
But I need more training if it’s not a bug with the breaks.
If you are in the career mode then I think it is related to this bug :Flap speeds in multiple aircraft are low causing deduction of points in career mode even at 0 ground speed
I have no problem stopping with the toe brakes. I can usually touch down on the second runway stripe and have it fully stopped two, maybe three stripes later (400-600 feet).
You definitely want to be a lot slower on short final - 61 knots is a typical “over the fence” speed for a 172SP. As you roundout your approach into the flare, make sure you smoothly reduce the throttle to idle. Use the elevator to hold it a foot or so off the runway until it simply can no longer fly and it will settle nicely onto the runway at a very low speed - 45-50 knots or so. You might get a stall warning just as it touches down - this is actually desirable.
Some folks, especially if they’re new, have trouble with the juggling of selecting a proper aimpoint, managing the glidepath with a combination of pitch and power, and transitioning to the roundout and flare. This is normal, but it can be overcome with the right practice.
Outside of technique, there are other things that can affect landing roll - headwind component, prescribed landing speed (which can be affected by weight), condition of the brakes, slope of the runway, condition of the runway, runway surface, obstacles, and density altitude.
There are also visual illusions which can mess with your perception of your approach and make you do funky things.
10 degrees of flaps (not %) can be used up to 110 knots indicated - this is not marked on the airspeed indicator (ASI) itself. 20° and 30° flaps cannot be used until below 85 knots, which is the top of the white arc in the ASI.
Bottom line: If you come in too fast or have too high of a descent rate, you’re going to balloon, float, etc - there will be too much lift and too much speed remaining and your brakes will not be as effective as they will if you touchdown at a more minimal speed. If you’re not using flaps, you’ll be fast and shallow and your landing roll will suffer.
Bottom line 2: your control bindings might be conflicting
I have only seen this with the Bonanza so far. The 172 G1000 doesn’t seem to produce this error.
Wow, thank you for the excellent tips. I will try that. Sorry, my flat with % and degrees 
I think it will get better and better.
Now I got no flaps overspeed message. Thanks @CharlieFox00 your tips are working fine. Now, I need more training landing on grass. It is hard to see any indicators of where the start of the landing runway is. My touch down was too early this time.
Soft-field landings are a whole different technique! 
And totally agree - soft runways are not always easy to discern!
If you’re flying with the default assistance (blue pathways), you’re probably be using the same approach all the time, with a steep turn before landing.
This approach requires a lot more experience than if you fly a charted approach, which usually gives you a lot more time flying straight before landing.
I crashed many times because of that and now I’m changing to charted approaches.
Other than that, try airports with long and large runways. Many missions pay good cash but send you to challenging flight conditions, specially when landing.
That’s it, study carefully your approaches and good luck.
Ironically, the “complex” pattern approach is learned and used early in flight training, and charted (IFR) approaches aren’t used until much later in a pilot’s arc. Charted approaches aren’t available for thousands of runways, anyway.
I recommend continuing to learn how to do patterns, especially for small to mid sized aircraft.
I know what you mean, I agree with that, but it depends on how you manage Career Mode.
When I fix my Cessna (150k), I won’t fly everywhere like before. Many airports have short runways and no “scape areas” if you need more space to brake.
I recommend your approach, but only as an employee, not using your own aircraft.
Fair. The combination of career mode forcing us into airports that are unuseable (in real life or just because of sim errors) and the heavy penalties it induces for working through that anyway is not a good combination.
In reality, we should probably just reject missions to those airports, using available resources like we would during preflight planning, but the in-sim mission list doesn’t make it easy.
Curiously enough I had concerns about the braking of the C172 in 2020 already. Losing the last few knots seemed to take forever: maybe they modeled brake fade? 
I have not looked into doing something similar in 2024, but in 2020 I adjusted the brakes. In 2020, the C172 Systems.cfg file had the following:
toe_brakes_scale = 0.46 ; Brake scalar
I changed that to .075 and it made things noticeably better in my estimation.
But curiously, I have noticed hard-ish braking in 2024 leads to black skidmarks behind the tyres. Possibly a consequence of different coefficients of friction?
Simulation is in such a high level today that I totally believe they’re copying the braking behavior of the C172.
Today I got into a flight in Germany with bad weather (clouds and icing) and it was just amazing how the aircraft behaved like a real one would. All the systems feel the changes in weather and that’s impressive.
It’s just like that. I just decided to fly 30 minutes cargo and ferry flight missions (mainly) without worrying about cash for now.
I’m planning my flights manually and flying with VOR and pilotage. When things get hard I turn the blue paths. I’m learning a lot by playing this way.
I think it’s better to take it easy and really learn each aircraft and world region. If you change it too much, you just won’t learn anything.