LAX06LA213 · Cessna T210M
Aerial Advertising Services Cessna T210M · Accident: propeller/rotor contact to person while standing
From Petaluma Municipal Airport (O69) to Hayward Executive Airport (HWD)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06LA213
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 1
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna T210M
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N761GW
- Operator
- Aerial Advertising Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Petaluma Municipal Airport (O69), Petaluma, CATo Hayward Executive Airport (HWD), Hayward, CA
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Standing · engine(s) operating
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Propeller/rotor contact to person
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Passenger › Clearance, not maintained
- Passenger › Visual lookout, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was standing with the engine operating when the passenger got out of the airplane and contacted the rotating propeller. The pilot stated that prior to the accident he and the passenger had flown to another airport. Following a brief stop, they flew to the accident airport. After landing the pilot taxied to the pad area where he turned the airplane around, positioning the nose to face the runways. The pilot began cooling down the turbocharged engine by maintaining low revolutions per minute (rpm), while keeping the airplane stationary. He planned to perform an approximate 5-minute cooling down period and then taxi the airplane to a parking area where he would shut down. After several minutes of the airplane standing, the passenger took off his headset, got out of the airplane, and walked into the rotating propeller. The pilot was not sure of the reasoning behind the passenger exiting the airplane but thought that he may have been getting impatient with the wait for the engine cool down. The pilot stated that the passenger was an experienced pilot; in recent years he mostly flew airplanes that were equipped with wing struts.
Probable cause
The passenger's failure to see and avoid the rotating propeller.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06LA213
- Event ID
- 20060706X00884
- Case number
- LAX06LA213
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9d274588aa0a3eb1bd07d713cf7d530631fe175aab322c58ec9b0706382d5f7f; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:15:49.058Z.