Plane crash kills 3 Tesla Motors employees, striking fear in East Palo Alto neighborhood

A fog-shrouded East Palo Alto neighborhood was thrown into chaos Wednesday when a twin-engine Cessna crashed shortly after an early-morning takeoff, spilling wreckage and bodies onto a quiet bayside street — and triggering a massive outage that turned high-tech Palo Alto into a powerless island for 10 hours.

The pilot and two passengers — all employees of Tesla Motors — were killed and three houses were damaged, including a home day care center.

The plane brought down a high tension transmission tower, then broke apart in a dramatic and terrifying descent over the East Palo Alto neighborhood. A wing slammed into the day care, landing gear smashed into a garage, an engine careened into a carport and the fuselage skidded to a halt in the middle of Beech Street. Flames shot out from houses and debris.

Miraculously, nobody on the ground was injured.

Pamela Houston and six others fled from the day care as the plane came crashing down shortly before 8 a.m.

"I grabbed the baby, and we ran into the street," she said. "We were all crying; we were screaming. There is not any word to describe the feeling.''

Authorities had not released the identities of any of the victims by late Wednesday. Authorities have also yet to identify who was piloting the plane, but the Cessna 310R was registered to a former Santa Clara company that was started by Doug Bourn, a Tesla engineer.

An investigator with the National

Transportation Safety Board said it's too early to say whether the plane struck power lines or a 60-foot transmission tower.

At the time the plane took off, visibility was so poor — only one-eighth of a mile, and only 100 feet above the ground — that flights had been canceled or delayed at the Bay Area's three major airports. Yet others speculated that the plane's unusual veering path suggested a mechanical failure. Investigators said it will be at least five days before they

finish a preliminary probe and months after that for an official report into what happened.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said taking off in bad weather is left up to the discretion of the pilot, whether it be a commercial or private plane. The Palo Alto Airport's control tower opened at 7 a.m., and the Cessna was the only plane to take off between then and around 8 a.m., Gregor said. He added that most commercial airlines have policies to follow before a pilot decides to fly.

On the ground, the fog added to the confusion — and fear. Residents on Beech Street described waking up to explosions; some of them told of watching parts of the plane fall from the dense fog that blanketed the area. And saddest yet, a young girl and 10-year-old boy described seeing the bodies.

Ten-year-old Luis Ramirez Sandin said he was in his front yard, getting ready to go to school, when he saw the blue-and-white plane descend, rock from side to side and then suddenly veer toward his home. It plunged to the street, striking several vehicles and bursting into flames, he said.

"There was no way to get near to help out,'' said his father, Benjamin Ramirez, through a translator. "It was too hot, with tall blue flames. Everybody kept telling us to run. They told us not to get near it."

"The first thing I thought about was my daughters," said Leslie Ramos of Menlo Park who was driving down Beech Street to pick up her two girls, ages 3 and 6, just

as the plane was crashing. "I left my car in the middle of the street and ran to the house."

When she was reunited with her daughters a few minutes later, the youngest was crying.

Others ran into the street to find thick smoke rising from three houses. Many feared the worst for the children at the in-home day care center, but it was too early for them to have arrived, and the people living in the house managed to escape out the back. "Some neighbors ran to the house to help,'' said Houston, one of the people at the day care center.

Menlo Park Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said he believes the plane clipped a power line on a PG&E high-tension transmission tower shortly after lifting off from the Palo Alto Airport runway just before 8 a.m., headed for Hawthorne Municipal Airport in Southern California.

Moments after the crash, the power went out in neighboring Palo Alto.

The city relies on PG&E's transmission lines to feed its city-run utility. Schools stayed open with teachers' improvising with no computers and principals using airhorns instead of class bells. Stanford Hospital resorted to backup power and diverted all nonemergency calls to hospitals outside the city.

Businesses throughout the city were either forced to close or count cash the old-fashioned way. Some merchants took to the sidewalks to hawk coffee, sandwiches and pastries. But many blacked out of Palo Alto's high-tech offices left for Menlo Park and Mountain View to crash at Wi-Fi cafes.

"I shudder at the thought of what it's going to cost in losses for these retailers," said Sherry Bijan, president of the Palo Alto Downtown Business and Professional Association.

When the Cessna took off, 16 Southwest Airlines flights out of Mineta San Jose International Airport already had been canceled because of the fog.

In foggy or cloudy weather conditions, planes taking of from Palo Alto Airport go straight down the runway and then turn 60 degrees to the right toward the bay at 1,000 feet, said Ken Gottfredson, who owns Advantage Aviation, a flying school and club for pilots that operates out of the Palo Alto Airport.

"He was off to the left of center by half a mile," Gottfredson said. "He should have been over the bay."

John Ferrell, a Los Altos Hills resident, who flies out of the airport three or four times a week, said he arrived there just after the ill-fated plane took off.

"You couldn't see 100 yards in front of you," Ferrell said. He noted that under those conditions, a plane can take off but not land because the runway isn't visible.

Despite speculation about the fog, Ferrell also suggested the plane's left engine may have gone out at takeoff, causing it to veer sharply to the left.

"Even in the best weather, if you lose an engine on takeoff, it's very difficult to overcome it," Ferrell said. "You have to level the wings. You have to feather the engine."

Bourn, an experienced pilot, has commercial and multiengine pilots licenses. An online bio from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers said he helped design and test the power electronics module for the Tesla Roadster. A graduate of Stanford University, Bourn enjoys "motorcycling, sky diving, flying and teaching others how to fly."

No one was home Wednesday morning at his single-story house in Santa Clara, where two motorcycles and a Lexus were in the driveway. Neighbors said he lives alone.

Bay Area News Group Staff Writers Mark Gomez, Diana Samuels, Shaun Bishop, Jessica Wax-Bernstein, Dana Hull and Sandra Gonzales contributed to this report. Contact Lisa Fernandez at 408-920-5002.

FATALITIES: Three employees of Tesla Motors die when a Cessna 310R crashes on takeoff Wednesday morning.
EAST PALO ALTO: No residents injured despite extensive damage to Beech Street homes.
PALO ALTO: Power outage cripples area businesses, residents, affecting 28,000 customers for about 10 hours