2 Airplanes Collide Over Santa Paula : Aviation: One pilot is killed as his craft crashes into houses near the runway. A second flier lands safely.

Two small planes collided on a midair approach to Santa Paula Airport on Thursday, killing one pilot as his plane crashed into two houses near the runway and sending seven horrified occupants fleeing unharmed from their burning homes.

The second pilot managed to land safely at the airport nearby at about 5:35 p.m., Santa Paula police said.

Ventura County Deputy Coroner Zelmira Isaac said that William Lewis Clark, 49, of Buttonwillow, Calif., was killed when the single-engine Cessna crashed into the houses about 300 yards from the end of the runway. The second pilot was not identified.

Clark had flown from Kern County to Santa Paula to pick up his two young children, both Ojai residents, who were waiting at the airport, she said.

Authorities said they did not immediately know who may have been responsible for the collision.

Clark was the 13th person to die in plane crashes at the small airport since it opened in 1930. The airport operates without a control tower.

Most recently, four people were killed in two crashes in 1991, including two in a collision between a plane and a helicopter carrying actor Kirk Douglas.

Police said it was a miracle Thursday that the crash left only one person dead, given that the careening plane smashed through the roof of one house then into another. The plane missed the people inside by just a few feet before exploding in flames.

In the first house, the family of David Garcia was seated at a table in the living room, watching television.

“The plane came down in the living room and exploded,” Garcia said.

A visitor, Tricia Olivares, said: “It went off like a bomb. Then you could see the sky through the ceiling.”

“We’re lucky to be alive,” Chris Garcia, 22, said. “It’s a miracle.”

The plane then hit the small house next door on the 1100 block of Santa Clara Street, the home of Francisco Perez.

Watching in horror from his back lawn, Perez screamed for the three boys inside. Perez’s 8-year-old son, Raul, and two neighbors, Raul and Jose Luis Magana, ages 12 and 10, scrambled out of the house.

“When the plane came down, we got through the door and called to them that the house was burning, and they came running out,” Perez’s friend Eliseo Moscaira said.

Moscaira said that he heard the sound of the colliding planes and turned to watch one “come down shaking, straight down. It hit the corner of the house about 15 feet away.”

Santa Paula Police Cmdr. Bob Gonzales said the plane fell into the Garcia house in two stages: It hit the roof and hung for a few seconds, giving the family just enough time to escape before the roof collapsed under its weight.

The fuselage of the plane then slid down the collapsed roof and into the living room, where it punched through the exterior wall and into the living room of the Perez home.

The wreckage continued to burn at such a hot temperature that it melted, Gonzales said.

Members of the Garcia family ran out of the house in their stocking feet. As investigators interviewed them, neighbors brought them extra socks and shoes.

The fires in both houses were fed by broken gas mains, said police, who evacuated surrounded houses until the lines could be shut off.

Police said thousands of rounds of ammunition were found in the Garcia house.

“Look, here’s what we were dodging,” said an officer, who would not give his name. He produced a flattened slug, one of hundreds that he said had exploded out of the fire.

Neighbor Ramon Sandez said he retrieved a three-gallon cooking pot full of charred money that he had stashed in the Perez home for safekeeping.

While police would not speculate at the cause of the crash, they said that Clark’s plane was involved in a long approach from the east.

The surviving pilot banked in from the side and clipped the wing of Clark’s plane, Sgt. Mike Saviers said.

The midair collision apparently occurred about 100 yards east of the Garcia house and about 400 feet overhead, Gonzales said. Both planes were planning to land in a westward path.

The plane that landed safely was slightly damaged. The pilot was taken to the hangar at the airport, under police supervision. “He’s pretty shaken up,” Gonzales said Thursday evening.

A National Transportation Safety Board investigator, who arrived at 9 p.m. from Los Angeles, said that both planes were flying in the established landing pattern.

Though the airport has no control tower, a radio system broadcasts information on prevailing winds and the best landing approach. The investigator said he had not learned what the system was telling the pilots Thursday evening.

There is also a single radio frequency on which all pilots communicate, broadcasting their location and flight plans.

Before Thursday’s crash, 12 fliers had died in crashes at the airport.

The most recent crash killed Thomas Grist Sr., 51, a commercial pilot and his passenger, David Knight, 45. The two burned to death in the wreckage of a hand-built airplane after it crashed into a golf cart shortly after takeoff on April 3, 1991.

On Feb. 13, 1991, veteran stunt and commercial pilot Lee Manelski, 46, and 18-year-old passenger David Tomlinson were killed when the aerobatic plane Manelski was flying smashed into a Bell JetRanger helicopter that lifted into their path.

The helicopter’s pilot, cartoon voice artist Noel Blanc, and a passenger, actor Kirk Douglas, were hospitalized with injuries. The third occupant of the helicopter, Beverly Hills Police Officer Michael Carra, was treated for cuts and bruises and released.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Tina Daunt and Mack Reed, and correspondent Patrick McCartney.