GAA17IA083 · Cessna 560 CITATION
Bill Massa Cessna 560 CITATION · Incident: course deviation while taxiing
From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS) to Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA17IA083
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 560 CITATION
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 560
- 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
- N22AF
- Operator
- Bill Massa
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS), Salinas, CATo Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS), Salinas, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 25 years (built 1991)
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- Defining eventThe 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
- Course deviation
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was taxiing the airplane to the parking area and was concerned about an airplane parked on the left side of the taxilane. He maneuvered his airplane right of the taxiway centerline and struck a helicopter parked on the right side of the taxiway. Postincident investigation revealed that the taxilane object free area (TOFA) was 47.5 ft on either side of the taxilane centerline; Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airport design standards indicate that the TOFA should have been 57.5 ft on either side of the centerline. Although the parked airplane was within the TOFA, sufficient distance between the airplane and the helicopter remained such that the incident airplane could have taxied safely between them.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain clearance from a parked helicopter.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA17IA083
- Event ID
- 20161130X21828
- Case number
- GAA17IA083
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2016-11-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 508b47e26428887a96301e65c3b19eaec4ebe0e2a90b7217a998e999219cf7e0; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:52:15.964Z.