3 Tesla Execs Dead In Palo Alto Plane Crash
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
This is the second paragraph of the article:
Employees at the electric carmaker — a company that has done everything but paint its logo green in a bid to sell itself as environmentally-friendly — have always had a penchant for gas-guzzling private airplanes. But that's sort of been the Tesla way. An electric car without compromising speed or style. The roadster's perfect for the Hollywood and Silicon Valley elite — environmental credibility without having to give up your private plane.
3 people just died. Is it really necessary to slam the type of people that buy electric cars in an article reporting on their deaths?
Remember, this is a site that hates electric cars. When some public figures who make electric cars die, it's good for the readership's religion. The cause has been advanced, don't you get it?
Right now just speculating, but I'd be curious to if anyone's created a breakdown of traffic fatalities by # of passengers in each vehicle and # passenger fatalities. I've seen that sort of thing before, but almost always in the context of teen/new drivers.
Couldn't find anything quickly, will look after work.
At least in an aircraft, theres always the possibility of ejecting out, bailing out, or using a "ballistic parachute" (Cirrus makes them)to recover the plane - the problem is when the pilot doesn't realize they're in trouble until its too late. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Aircraft_Parachute_Syste...
Bailout options do exist for GA/Light Aircraft.
From the limited amount of technical details available, I would guess that a combination of the two happened here.
While small duel engine aircraft may be able to sustain cruising altitude under significant strain on one engine, they are notorious for not being able to climb, and particular take off with only half power - certainly not with 3 people and baggage.
This is speculation, but by the looks of the location of the crash, and given that Palo Alto airport has a left hand pattern on runway 31 (that is, they fly counter-clockwise around the airport after taking off in the magnetic direction of 310 degrees) they most likely experienced a power failure during or very shortly after take off on one engine (but maybe both) and attempted to turn back to the airport to land. Interestingly +100ft transmission towers east of the airport are mentioned in FAA notices. These may or may not refer to the ~200ft power lines in the neighborhood. Without of a power failure they should have been +500ft before turning crosswind.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...
The reality of the situation is that, like medicine, reactive measures like Bailout mechanisms will always be less successful than preventive treatments which maintain good health, here in the form of thorough annual maintenances, preflight inspections, and run-ups (testing the full operation of the engine before leaving the ground.)
That said, there are other systems that can help in accidents like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAWS
Another option is NavFLIR / EVS which is basically a IR camera to give enhanced visibility during bad weather.
If they did have an engine failure after take-off, NavFLIR could have aided a forced landing. The cause of this crash are not yet known.
Feel free to email me if you want.
This is the first time I'd seen video footage of the Cirrus shoot deployed in a non-simulation environment. Unfortunately only those onboard the glider survived.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/06/boulder-air-collisi... (video at bottom.)
As an intern, I worked for a company and found in the employee manual that there were explicit restrictions on the number of execs who could be on the same plane or even in the same car!
I thought it was a silly clause and asked about it and the execs said, "Yes, the probability is small, but multiplied by the damage that would occur gives a very big risk of damage." That made a lot of sense. It doesn't cost much to avoid the risk, just take different flights.
Source: http://twitter.com/kensweet/status/9247008924 (guy is a reporter for FOX Business)
He co-founded Akamai and was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, possibly while trying to stop a hijacker. A very smart and influential guy who died tragically.
"Three Tesla employees were on board a plane that crashed in East Palo Alto early this morning. We are withholding their identities as we work with the relevant authorities to notify the families. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. Tesla is a small, tightly-knit company, and this is a tragic day for us." - Elon Musk, CEO
Local TV news (sorry, no link) reports that planes taking off from that run-way must turn 10 degrees left or 10 degrees right after take-off. They can't go straight because of a nearby field (Moffet field) - a former naval air base currently owned by NASA and famous for being where the Google guys park their jet.
This plane was planned (or instructed, I'm not sure) to go right - they went left.
That they went left AND that they failed to gain enough altitude to avoid the power lines is tentatively speculated to be indicative of a left engine failure.
They took out three high-tension power lines which, the plane geek quoted on the news pointed out, is "likely to seriously interfere with the forward progress of the plane". They came down in a very dense residential neighborhood with debris hitting a nearby day-care center.
A consolation is that as of this report, the pilot and passengers appear to be the only victims. The plane mostly came down in the middle of a street. Nearby residents report that they tried but could not get anywhere close to the plane because of the intensity of the heat from the fuel flame. It was the resident's impression that post-crash fuel explosions scattered debris which is what led to the structure fires.
The thought that occurs to me is that I wonder if the pilot retained enough control that he aimed for the street on purpose either hoping for a survivable crash landing or (shudder) in a heroic last act to save others knowing he had no chance, personally.
Apparently, CEOs, doctors and the like assume that competence in one area of life implies that they're competent to do anything, like flying a plane.
My thought is, if I die or become horribly brain-damaged, I won't really care, because the capacity to care is gone. Existence only goes as far as you can interpret it.
Race you across the interstate! Go!
> If the average speed of car travel is 50 miles per hour, those 1.7 deaths occur in 2 million hours of driving. This makes general aviation, with 16 deaths per 1 million hours, roughly 20 times as dangerous per hour than driving.
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety
If you look at "danger per mile", GA is only ~10x as dangerous as driving. I prefer the "per hour" statistic, though, but not for any good reason.
Of note: every insurance company I've ever dealt with for life and property insurance has asked if I'm a private pilot. My last renter's insurance policy had a rider exempting me from coverage when flying. Insurance companies are historically pretty good at assessing risk. Profitable ones, anyway.
It's seems like once every other month you hear about a small passenger jet crashing like this. This one happening yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/nyregion/17plane.html
Anyone know if it's certain types of small aircraft that are prone to this or is it just small civilian operated aircraft in general?
Don't think I'll by getting on one of these anytime soon in any case.
> According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in 2005 general aviation in the United States (excluding charter) suffered 1.31 fatal accidents for every 100,000 hours of flying in that country, compared to 0.016 for scheduled airline flights.
(One can imagine many reasons for this; more professional maintenance, more professional pilots, more redundancy in the systems of big airplanes; whatever. But the safety differential is not imaginary.)
This is truly sad news.
I'm not connected at all with the private aviation industry... What is the useful (safe?) lifespan of an aircraft like this?
for reference, most of the big commercial airlines have an average fleet age in the range of 15-20 years.
The report suggests that the power outage in Palo Alto may have been caused by the plane crash. I find this hard to believe because the traffics lights were only down in the area near Stanford and downtown PA; as you drove closer to East Palo Alto, the lights were working. Of course maybe there was a larger outage earlier, and they just restored it in this pattern.
What did they do? Shoot a missile through the fog? Take it down with a privately owned F14? Plant a bomb on it before it took off?
It's a ridiculous hypothesis.
Have a non-fatal accident and you as pilot-in-command are required to report it within 72 hours, but no one from the NTSB is likely to ever see the aircraft in question in person.
Commercial Part 121 crashes get large amounts of attention and amazing levels of effort (the reconstruction of TWA800 is astonishing to me). If I bend my 182 and don't kill anyone, they'll only know about it because I have to tell them and they'll file my submission away.
Sabotaging a plane is easy, sabotaging a plane and leaving no trace is almost impossible.
Someone always says this anytime there's a plane crash and someone slightly famous dies, but frankly it would be a pretty stupid way to assassinate someone - hard to coordinate, and far too easy to leave a forensic trail that's a mile wide. Tesla is not and was never about to put any big oil company out of business; even if they were, it would be so much simpler to undermine the company by corrupting personnel with money, drugs or sex.
The sad facts are that taking off/landing a plane is hard work and doing so on instruments is particularly dangerous, and that being capable and successful does not confer immortality. It's not even tragic: it's just plain old bad luck for the colleagues and families of these people, and that's the saddest fact of all.
Oh and look at that, just a few weeks ago the NTSB ruled that accident was likely pilot error and not some kind of crazy conspiracy involving mechanical tampering: http://www.ohio.com/news/83119417.html
The world is more often than not a strange place.
My deepest condolences to their families.
I'm suspicious it is somehow related to the oil overlords. Big money, big risks.