The twin-engine Cessna 310 crashed about 8 a.m. yesterday in East Palo Alto, shortly after taking off in fog from Palo Alto Airport. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said the victims’ names were being withheld while relatives were notified. No injuries were reported on the ground.
“Tesla is a small, tightly knit company,” Musk said in an e-mail. “This is a tragic day for us.”
Yesterday’s accident came as San Carlos, California-based Tesla prepares to sell shares to the public, announce the location of its U.S. auto-assembly site and, later this year, move its headquarters to Palo Alto. Tesla has more than 500 employees and has delivered about 1,000 of its $109,000 Roadsters to buyers such as actor George Clooney.
Electricity was cut across Palo Alto, affecting about 28,000 customers and forcing Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital to rely on emergency systems as crews worked to restore power.
“The plane when taking off struck a power tower,” East Palo Alto Police Captain John Chalmers said. “One of the wings came off and hit a residential structure.”
Tower Advisory
Palo Alto Airport has a 2,443-foot (745-meter) asphalt runway on which planes can take off either to the northwest or the southeast, according to the Web site Airnav.com. Advisories to pilots there include a warning about electric-transmission towers taller than 100 feet east of the airport.
“It’s foggy, but air pilots that are instrument-rated have no problem taking off in those conditions,” said Carl Honaker, director of airports for Santa Clara County.
Hawthorne Municipal Airport in suburban Los Angeles was the plane’s destination, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Musk’s Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is the site of much of the development work for Tesla’s next auto, the Model S sedan. Tesla received about $465 million in federal loans last year to expand production of vehicles and battery packs.
The crash occurred about a mile northwest of Palo Alto Airport and about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of San Francisco. Two homes and several cars were set on fire, said Harold Schapelhouman, fire chief of nearby Menlo Park.
No Power
With the power off during business hours yesterday, employees of Hewlett-Packard and Facebook were told to find alternate places to work, according to company representatives. Users’ ability to access Facebook’s site was unaffected, the social-networking company said.
The Cessna was registered to Air Unique Inc. The address for that company is also the home address for Tesla engineer Doug Bourn, according to online listing service Switchboard.com. Musk said in an e-mail that Tesla was working with “relevant authorities” to reach the victims’ families.
Tesla isn’t alone in losing a group of employees in a small-plane crash. In January 2002, Agco Corp. CEO John Shumejda and Ed Swingle, senior vice president of sales at the farm- equipment maker, were killed along with three crew members in a business-jet crash in Birmingham, Alabama.
Auto Custom Carpets President Jeff Moses and four members of his management team died in February 2009 in a small private- plane crash near Talladega, Alabama.
While many big companies encourage senior executives to fly separately if they have a large-enough corporate fleet, employees are more likely to travel together at smaller businesses, said Bill Waldock, a crash investigation professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
“Especially these days with budget cuts, there are probably a lot more groups of employees flying together for efficiency purposes,” Waldock said.
About 86 percent of passengers aboard business airplanes are mid-level employees, including salespeople and engineers, according to a survey by the National Business Aviation Association in Washington.
--With assistance from Brian Womack and Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco; Mary Jane Credeur in Atlanta; Mary Schlangenstein in Dallas; John Hughes in Washington and Emily Feldman in New York. Editors: Ed Dufner, Lisa Wolfson
To contact the reporters on this story: Ryan Flinn in San Francisco at +1-415-617-7176 or rflinn@bloomberg.net; Alan Ohnsman in Los Angeles at +1-323-782-4236 or aohnsman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jonathan Thaw at +1-415-617-7168 or jthaw@bloomberg.net Ed Dufner at +1-214-954-9453 or edufner@bloomberg.net
973035z US
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire