Ben Jackson wrote:

On a slightly related note, I always saw flat spots on the tires of
rental airplanes and I wondered if I'd been responsible for any of them.
Now that I've had the same set of tires for hundreds of landings I know
it must be harder than I thought to flat-spot a tire.

It must be easy to do in a Mooney. A club I belonged to for a while was
constantly having flat-spotted mains on their Mooneys, and I've also
seen it on the Mooney I own with partners. I may have been responsible
for some of that when I first joined the partnership. I started being
more careful about braking and the flat-spots haven't come back. I get
smoother landings if I don't land in a full stall, and all the weight
doesn't come on the wheels 'til you've slowed down a bit. If you start
braking too early it's easy to lock up the mains and not feel it.