It was a car that had brought the three men together — a cutting-edge electric sedan that they were racing to finish by next year — but when the time came to get quickly to Southern California, they chose to fly a small, piston-driven airplane that was more than a quarter-century old.

As pilot Doug Bourn and passengers Andrew Ingram and Brian Finn sat idling at the southern end of the Palo Alto Airport's lone runway Wednesday morning, the thrum of the Cessna 310's twin engines rising as they awaited clearance for takeoff, the fog was so dense that they wouldn't have been able to see the cars they had arrived in. Bourn had to get the earliest start, coming from Santa Clara to put his plane through its preflight checklist.

At 56, Bourn was the senior member of the Tesla Motors team headed to Hawthorne, where the car company performs some design work, he was also the only one of the three with two motorcycles. Ingram, 31, had been able to roll out later from the apartment on Palo Alto's Homer Avenue, where he lived with his cat, Gizmo.

Finn, 42, lived so close to the airport that on mornings like this, when fog held the sound close to the ground, he almost certainly could hear the planes struggling to gain altitude. When something went horribly wrong just seconds after takeoff Wednesday, Finn came within two blocks of crashing into the home where he lived with his wife and 1-year-old daughter.

Investigators from the National

Transportation Safety Board are just beginning the lengthy job of figuring out what caused the plane to come tumbling out of the sky — killing all three men on board.

The plane clipped a PG&E power line and showered debris across an area the length of four football fields — more than double the distance Bourn would have been able to see as he throttled up. When the fuselage came to rest on East Palo Alto's Beech Street, destroying two houses but miraculously injuring no one on the ground, it marked the abrupt end of three classic Silicon Valley success stories.

As a senior electrical engineer, Bourn helped develop the Tesla Roadster that is the Palo Alto-based company's showpiece. "Doug was a fine man, a superb engineer, an inspiration to those who knew him, and a big part of the success of Tesla Motors," Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard wrote in an e-mail to his former colleagues.

When Bourn asked Eberhard for the use of a conference room at Tesla to teach his own flight school, Eberhard told him of his own yearning to be a pilot, curtailed by the airport shutdowns after the attacks of Sept. 11. "Doug, with his characteristic smile, tried hard to convince me to join his class and finish the program," Eberhard wrote. "Flying was one of his great joys and he wanted to share that joy with his friends."

By all accounts, he was good at it. Federal Aviation Administration records show Bourn had his license since 1974, and he had never been involved in an accident or cited for violations.

"When we would go flying, I remember him taking great measures to inspect the aircraft, to figure out and file his flight plan, to make sure everything was properly planned out," said Ellen Humphrey, who met Bourn when they worked at a company called Zilog. They were married for three years. "Doug was a very skilled pilot, a very safe pilot. I know he wouldn't fly if he thought it was dangerous."

Bourn's enthusiasm for flying led him to volunteer with the charity Angel Flight West, which uses private planes to ferry patients to medical facilities. "He was a guy who was very giving," said Paul Weihs, a pilot who flies out of the Palo Alto Airport. "He donated his time, money and energy to fly sick people so they can get better. That's the nature of his character."

The same nature that led him to happily tinker with neighbors' computers or volunteer at a robotics club at Castilleja Middle School in Palo Alto.

On Wednesday, he was headed for Hawthorne, where Tesla Chairman Elon Musk is preparing to take on NASA at his other technology startup, SpaceX. Design work on Tesla's new Model S is being done there, and Brian Finn — a senior interactive electronics manager who joined Tesla in 2008 — was a whiz at devising just the sort of features that make driving fun. He was spearheading work on an interactive touch-screen for the $50,000 electric sedan.

"Brian was one of the most passionate automotive engineers I have ever met," said Klaus Schaaf, a friend of Finn's when the two worked together at Volkswagen. "Cars, that was his world."

An avid guitar player and an insatiable skier, Finn made no attempt to conceal his passion for anything on four wheels. "Our free time was spent going to new car and wholesale lots," recalled Laurel Finn, his first wife. "He would say, 'Oh, look at this car! Look at that car.' That was like an evening's adventure for him. He liked looking at cars, and thinking about cars and dreaming about cars."

Andrew Ingram loved creating audio systems for cars that would blow your hair back even if you weren't in a convertible. At 31, he was a startup himself, a lot like the company he worked for as an electrical engineer for two-and-a-half-years. "He was really passionate about his work," said Ellen Leanse, who rowed with Ingram on the intermediate crew team at Redwood City's Bear Island Aquatic Center. "He was really excited, and proud of Tesla."

After taking up rowing in 2008, Ingram became legendary among his crewmates for wearing Lycra shorts that looked like bluejeans — complete with fake pockets. "They were like his signature," Leanse said. "He just had so much fun on race day putting them on. They were definitely something he knew was tacky, and he had a lot of fun with that."

Recently, he brought his team a lemon poppy seed cake, baked by a woman he had just started dating. "It's so sad because I just feel like he was a really talented, really lovely young guy, at a real moment of coming into his own," Leanse said. "He was really just the nicest guy."

Mercury News Staff Writers Lisa M. Krieger, Linda Goldston and Dana Hull contributed to this report. Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.