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almost all of those questions having to do with my emotional recovery (nice guy), and then he proceeded to enter the airplane. He climbed up into the left front seat and pushed on the brakes. I’m so thankful that the left brake went to the floor as it did on my fateful landing. That was all the ASI needed to see to determine that I was not fabricating a story. His report listed the crash as a “brake failure,” and I took pride that it didn’t say “pilot error.”
I kept my sanity by telling myself that it wasn’t my fault, that I was a good pilot, and that this could happen to anyone. For years I kept up this talk whenever the story of the crash would come up in conversation. But, as every pilot should hope, our emotional maturity increases, and we can see a tragedy with a clear set of eyes. With more maturity and emotional health, I can describe what caused that crash. And it was not a brake failure.
The cause of that crash was that I didn’t perform a brake check. That’s it. It is as simple as that—a brake check. Every pro pilot knows that a brake check is mandatory before every landing. Read any checklist from any airplane built in the last 50 years that can have a single point of failure (nearly 90 percent of planes flown by readers of this article!), and in that landing checklist will be a brake check. A pilot should know the condition of the brakes before every landing.
Why? Aside from plain old good aviation technique, a brake check is required in every pressurized airplane
with one tire on each trunnion because the pressurized air in the cabin tries to equalize air pressure at all times, and it will gladly take any path of least resistance. Air can escape through the seal along the door, through the rubber gaskets at the openings where the flight controls travel, and that same air will fill a brake cylinder if there is a crack in the rubber o-rings surrounding the shaft entering the wheel cylinder.
That happened to me. A 30-cent o-ring had cracked, al- lowing pressurized air to enter the left brake cylinder and fill it with air. When I pushed on the brake, the compress- ible air compressed, and there was no braking action on only the left brake. 30 cents. OMG. A failure in a 30-cent part caused my Mirage to crash.
It was a contributing factor, but it was not the decid- ing factor. At the end of the analysis, the deciding factor was me. I should have chosen a different airport than the Piggott Airport. I’d used that airport successfully many times, but it only took one time for Murphy to show up and spoil the party. When operating in an environment with little margin, everything must be right. There’s no way I should have considered landing at Piggott with a known soft brake. I could have easily landed at Kennett Memorial (KTKX), which had a 5000 ft runway (along with super- cheap fuel) and was only 15 miles away.
But I was in a rush. I had a lunch engagement to meet. I was ready to serve pizza and shake hands. I was prepared
12 • TWIN & TURBINE / June 2023
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