2 Die as Their Plane Crashes Into Orchard : Aviation: The victims, who maintained a Thousand Oaks residence, were returning to Arizona home. The aircraft barely missed houses.

An Arizona couple who also maintained a residence in Thousand Oaks were killed early Thursday morning when their single-engine plane plummeted into an eastern Ventura lemon orchard less than five minutes after taking off from Camarillo Airport, authorities said.

John William Reeds Jr., 65, and Patsy Jean Reeds, 62, died instantly when their four-seat turbocharged Mooney 231 plunged out of low clouds in a near-vertical dive and crashed into a 45-acre lemon orchard off Bristol Road about 8:20 a.m., according to federal authorities and the Ventura County coroner’s office.

No one on the ground was injured, but the plane missed a row of houses on Ermine Avenue by about 300 feet. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration investigators at the scene said the pair had just departed Camarillo Airport and had filed a flight plan for Sedona, Ariz.

That plan called for the Reeds to navigate by instruments alone while climbing above the heavy, low clouds and fog to a higher altitude, where clear skies prevailed, according to NTSB investigator Thomas Wilcox.

The Reeds left under “instrument conditions”--weather typically marked by the low altitude of the clouds and limited visibility.

There was nothing at the site to immediately indicate why the plane, a 1983 model first purchased by the Reeds in 1987, crashed, Wilcox said.

“At this point we just don’t know what caused this accident,” Wilcox said. “We know that he departed Camarillo without incident, but three or four minutes later he crashed. We have witnesses saying he descended out of the clouds nose down.”

The speed of the aircraft at impact was evident from the fact that most of the plane’s engine compartment and part of its cockpit were driven 4 to 5 feet into the ground.

Wilcox added that investigators could not find any evidence of fire or explosion at the crash site or elsewhere in the orchard, which is owned by Helen J. Ellis, the great-aunt of Ventura City Councilman Greg Carson.

John Reeds III said his parents flew out of airports in the area on a regular basis.

“I just don’t know what went wrong,” Reeds said in an interview late Thursday from his Simi Valley home. “They both have been flying for the last several years and never had a problem. They were trying to sell the house in Thousand Oaks for the last year but had been living mostly in Sedona. They’ve been flying back and forth a lot lately.”

Reeds said his father was a retired aerospace engineer for Hughes Aircraft Inc.

Witnesses said they believed the white Mooney, which is also known as an M-20K, never lost power and in fact the pilot may have gunned its 210-horsepower engine just before the crash in a failed attempt to climb out of the dive.

Don Burke, a 25-year-old Ventura resident, said he was driving to work on Bristol Road when he saw the plane nose-dive into the orchard.

“I was just driving along and looked over to my right and saw him go down,” Burke said. “It was surreal. It reminded me of how those wooden model airplanes look when you throw them and they loop down violently. When it hit the ground, it kicked up a huge spray of dew off the lemon trees.”

People living nearby said they believed that at first a crop duster was preparing to spray the field when they heard the crash.

“My first thought was that something had hit my house,” said Karen Dunwoody, 43, whose back yard faces the orchard. “When the plane went down it shook the house pretty good. At first we didn’t know what was going on.”

Walt Lawhn, 43, was gardening in his front yard at the time of the accident. “I heard the plane, looked up and saw it bank into a step dive,” Lawhn said.

“Then, about four seconds later I heard a very loud thud. I ran to the plane and called out to see if anyone was alive, but there wasn’t any response. There was blood everywhere. It was pretty awful.”

Ventura Fire Department crews brought in heavy lifting equipment at the site to dislodge the tangled wreck from the ground and free the bodies.

FAA records show that both the Reeds held valid pilot’s licenses and that John William Reeds was rated to fly the aircraft by instruments alone. The couple both passed an FAA medical examination in March, 1993.

Once dug out from the ground, parts of the wreck were loaded onto a truck for delivery to Camarillo Airport where a more detailed analysis can be performed. Along with John Reeds III, the Reeds are also survived by a daughter, Eileen, of Texas.

Times staff writer Peggy Y. Lee contributed to this story.