Life at the End of the Runway Filled With Noise, Fear, Sometimes Tragedy

Foster Rivas saw the small plane before anyone else Friday, as it banked twice to the left and headed due west toward his front yard.

Normally he wouldn’t even look up. But a small plane had slammed into a couple of houses two doors away on Thursday so his eyes carefully tracked the craft on its glide to Earth.

It buzzed low, perhaps a couple of hundred feet above. It shook the windows of Rivas’ rented wood-frame house.

“Boy, they’re flying high today,” he said when the plane had passed overhead and landed safely at the Santa Paula Airport. “I wonder how long that’s going to last.”

Rivas and others in the working-class neighborhood said Friday that life at the end of the runway is full of fear and close calls.

The skies are unfriendly here, they said, often filling with planes that come in too fast, too loud and too low. Sometimes they descend to Earth at odd angles that make residents wonder if the pilots know what they are doing. Their propellers periodically clip the tops of tall palm trees that line the streets.

And sometimes, they just drop out of the sky.

Pilot William Lewis Clark from Kern County died Thursday afternoon after his plane collided with another in midair and crashed into two houses, setting them ablaze. The other pilot, Andrew Sinclair of Santa Paula, and a pilot-trainee landed safely at the airport.

Seven residents escaped unharmed from the two houses, although Daniel Garcia was hospitalized for smoke inhalation. He was in fair condition Friday at Santa Paula Memorial Hospital.

The crash and subsequent fire gutted two houses. Red lights and sirens filled the neighborhood for much of the night.

But ambulances and firefighters are familiar sights to neighbors of the airport that has no control tower or air traffic controllers.

Rivas said three planes have crashed in the 1 1/2 years he has lived in the rental house. A tall palm tree that provides the only shade for his front lawn has been clipped several times by aircraft taking off and landing.

“They come in so low, it looks like you can almost touch them with your hand,” Rivas said. “It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

Some residents talked about changing things, about demanding that air regulations be altered so that the neighborhood was not directly in the landing path.

But as quickly as the idea was conceived, residents pushed it aside as improbable and ultimately a waste of time.

“We here are poor and Mexican,” said an old man in slow and deliberate Spanish. “They have never listened to us before. What makes you think they will listen to us now?”

Some residents talked of moving from the neighborhood, a collection of 80-year-old homes occupied primarily by longtime Latino residents and first-time renters.

Three streets--Santa Clara, Oak and Montebello--make one big loop around the modest houses sandwiched between the Santa Paula Freeway and the Santa Clara River.

The sputter of small airplanes is a constant reminder of the neighboring airport. Arrivals and departures start early and continue all day.

“You can just see them coming straight at you,” said Elvira Garcia, who lives in one of three houses along the westernmost perimeter of the aging subdivision. Her house sits in the last row of houses between the neighborhood and the airfield.

“They have no business flying over our houses,” said Garcia, 26, watching a steady parade of planes land behind her house. “These planes are loud. It feels like they are right on top of our roof.”

Before Thursday, some residents said days or weeks could pass before they noticed air traffic.

Steve Gomez said he only looked up when planes roared in so fast and so low that they shook the houses. He described those planes as “the ones you could hit with an orange.”

But Friday, he and his buddies craned their necks to watch each plane land.

“We want to make sure they don’t come and land on us again,” Gomez said.

Nearby, members of the Garcia family sifted through the blackened rubble that used to be their three-bedroom home. Four members of the family were watching television around a living room table when the plane crashed. A few weeks ago, the family bought new leather couches and decided to rearrange the furniture in their living room.

The old couches used to be exactly where the plane punched into the living room.

Firefighters were hampered in their efforts to put out the ensuing blaze by thousands of rounds of ammunition that had been stored in the Garcia house and exploded with the fire. The Garcias are big-game hunters, family members explained as they dug out broken shotguns and rifles.

The Garcias are talking about rebuilding. After all, the family built one of the first houses in the neighborhood before there was an airport. But other neighbors aren’t so sure they want to live in the flight path.

“I’m not going to stay here,” Rivas said, wondering aloud about places to go that are not near airports. “It’s too damn scary at my house.”