Acceleration was sluggish, and the pilot-in-command (PIC) was unable to pull the airplane’s nose off the runway when the Cessna Citation 560XLS+ reached rotation speed. The airplane ran off the end of the runway and crashed into a building, killing all four occupants and injuring four people on the ground.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the probable cause of the accident was the PIC’s failure to release the parking brake before takeoff and that a contributing factor was the absence of a discrete on-aboard indication that the parking brake was engaged. NTSB noted that although transport category airplane certification regulations had been changed 19 years before the accident to require such an indication, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had not required the Citation XL and its derivatives to meet the new standard.
The accident airplane was owned by a real estate company based in Farmington, Connecticut, U.S., and…
