Holding Pattern : Safety Record Bleak at Rural Airfield : Accidents: The Santa Paula strip, which is ringed by mountains, had 23 crashes resulting in 10 deaths during a 10-year period--more than any other airport of its size in the state.

On Aug. 8, 1930, Santa Paula Mayor William L. Ramsey strode onto the runway at the city’s new airport and declared that the dirt strip would put the dusty little town on the map.

“It brings to us something we have long needed,” Ramsey said. “Something that will make us known outside our confines as more than an agricultural community.”

Over the years the airport has added to Santa Paula’s rustic allure, drawing pilots from around the country eager to view its extensive collection of antique planes.

But a Times survey shows another, less desirable distinction: In the past 10 years, more planes have crashed at Santa Paula than any other airport of its size in the state.

The private airport’s small landing strip and proximity to surrounding mountains leave little room for error, said Santa Paula Police Chief Walt Adair, who learned to fly there more than 30 years ago.

“You don’t have a lot of open farmland for emergency landings,” he said. “Instead, you’ve got mountains on each side, which forces a lot of airplanes into a small space. It’s an airport people need to be familiar with, and everybody needs to pay attention.”

From 1984 to 1994, Santa Paula reported more crashes than any other California airport with a comparable number of flights, a Times survey of 135 airports found.

During that time, Santa Paula Airport logged 23 crashes that claimed the lives of 10 people, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

The survey also found that Santa Paula is more accident-prone than any other airport in Ventura County. Camarillo Airport, with nearly four times as many flights each year, had the same number of crashes as Santa Paula and three fewer fatalities from 1984 to 1994. And Oxnard Airport, with twice as many flights as Santa Paula, reported just four crashes and one death.

Bruce Dickenson, vice president of the Santa Paula Airport board, said concerns about crashes are overblown.

Standing near the runway, he pointed angrily at the Santa Paula Freeway, which runs along the northern flank of the airport.

“That freeway right there kills more people in a year than this airport in its entire 65 years,” he said. “Go-carts kill people. Recreational vehicles kill people. How many people are killed each year in dune buggies?”

Any pilot seen flying irresponsibly risks losing the right to fly at Santa Paula Airport. Dickenson said he himself has barred several pilots from landing there.

But to seek the ultimate penalty against a pilot--a one-year license suspension through the Federal Aviation Administration--is contrary to the airport’s founding principles.

“We are a small-town, friendly airport,” said Robert Van Ausdell, who serves on the airport’s safety committee. “We can handle these matters on our own.”

The airport prides itself on its private status. Unlike most airports, which rely on federal grants to pay for projects from runway paving to control towers, not a penny of government money has ever been spent in Santa Paula.

The last of Ventura County’s once-common private landing strips, Santa Paula Airport is a throwback to a time when any farmer with a field could clear a strip of land and have an airport.

Such strips once graced the farms, fields and dusty roads of Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Fillmore and Ventura.

“Airports like this are an endangered species,” Dickenson said. “People come here to get away from the hassle of city life. The last thing they want to see is a bunch of overblown rules and regulations ruining everything.”

It was Bruce Dickenson’s grandfather, Santa Paula cattle and citrus farmer Ralph Dickenson, who founded the airport 20 years after he launched his flying career with a crash.

In 1910, 16-year-old Ralph Dickenson took a mail-order glider to the top of a Saticoy ridge and jumped. The glider fell straight down, hitting a pepper tree and severing one of young Dickenson’s ears.

“He didn’t know the first thing about flying,” grandson Bruce said. “He just went ahead and did it.”

Sixteen years later, Ralph Dickenson tried flying again. In 1930, Dickenson and 19 friends invested $1,000 apiece and opened Santa Paula Airport on the south bank of the Santa Clara River.

As the airport gradually expanded, the airport association sold the hangars, but held onto the land. Any time hangar owners left, they had to sell their property back to the association, which controlled the prices.

Today, the airport’s 100 hangars go for $30,000 to $40,000 each, a third what they would cost on the open market. Rent on the land is $10 a month, the same as it was in 1930. The hangar waiting list, framed and yellowing in the airport office, is 40 names long.

“You’re lucky if you even make it onto that list,” Dickenson said. “We don’t have a lot of turnover around here.”

The collegial atmosphere never fails to draw crowds to the airport’s traditional open house, held the first Sunday of each month.

At a recent open house, longtime pilots unveiled their gussied-up antique planes for public perusal. And Ken Smith, a regular visitor from Granada Hills, readied his 17-year-old, two-seat Cessna for a quick trip around the valley.

“Clear!” he barked from the cockpit. The engine rumbled and the plane began to shake.

“That’s to make sure nobody’s around,” he explained. “If you get caught in that prop it’ll dice you up like a blender.”

As Smith waited his turn in a line stacked six deep, a plane dipped in for landing. Before it had cleared the strip, another crept up from behind, ready to fly.

“Two planes on the runway at the same time. That’s a safety violation,” Smith noted, shaking his head.

“Sundays can get pretty wild out here,” he said. “Sometimes people get impatient. With no tower, people have to be on their best behavior.”

All aviators who land at the airport receive a pamphlet outlining proper takeoff and landing procedures, and FAA safety classes are held at the airport several times each year.

A five-member safety committee meets once a month to review complaints and make recommendations to the airport association’s board of directors.

After a fatal midair collision between an airplane and a helicopter in 1991, the board prohibited helicopter flights without advance permission.

Because Santa Paula Airport has no tower, pilots follow visual flight rules, meaning they must rely on their line of vision to stay out of harm’s way. Many planes are radio-equipped, and pilots tune to a common band to alert each other of their location.

Increased education about safe flying is the best way to decrease the accident rate, said Bob Phelps, chairman of the safety committee.

“We’re very much concerned about safety,” said Phelps, who logged 14,000 hours in the air over a 49-year career as an FAA executive. “There’s no question about it. Safety has always been our No. 1 priority.”

The most common cause of crashes at Santa Paula is pilot error, described as poor judgment, poor airplane handling, inadequate supervision and overconfidence in personal ability, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

These pilot failures have caused planes to crash into houses, other planes, cars, a golf cart, telephone wires, airport hangars and the surrounding mountains.

Alarmed by the deaths at Santa Paula, some residents have called for a control tower. But federal crash investigators say the mix of aircraft and the amount of traffic at the strip do not justify the expense of installing and operating a tower. Of some 17,000 airports in the United States, only about 400 have control towers.

Spokesman Fred O’Donnell said the FAA considers installing a tower each time it investigates a crash at Santa Paula.

“In each case the conclusion has been that there’s not enough traffic to warrant it,” O’Donnell said. “We see the Santa Paula situation as a pilot education process. It’s not an air traffic control issue.”

Longtime airport tenants agree, blaming the high crash rate on inexperienced pilots unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain of the Santa Clara River Valley.

Van Ausdell, who has stored planes at the airport for 35 years, refuses to fly on the weekends. “Every airplane in the 11 Western states flies in to have lunch,” he said. “I’m not getting involved with that.”

One high-profile accident involving an out-of-town pilot occurred in 1991, when a stunt plane flown by a veteran Santa Paula pilot, Lee Manelski, collided with a helicopter carrying actor Kirk Douglas. Manelski and his co-pilot, David Tomlinson, were killed in the crash, and Douglas was injured. Investigators found the helicopter pilot, Noel Blanc, to have been at fault.

But some so-called transient pilots, those who frequent Santa Paula Airport but hangar their planes elsewhere, say the longtime tenants are partly to blame.

“Some of these guys are incredibly territorial,” Smith said. “They think of this airport as theirs, so they don’t always follow the rules. And sometimes they’ll do something crazy just to show you who’s the boss.”

Of the 23 accidents from 1984 through 1994, at least 10 involved pilots from Santa Paula Airport.

One pilot buzzed just above the Santa Clara River bed and got tangled in a telephone wire. Another failed to refuel, ran out of gas a mile from the airport and plopped into the river. A third pilot tried to fly 160 miles to his Santa Paula home after a 14-hour day, was engulfed by a cloud and crashed into a mountainside two miles from the airport.

“Frankly it’s no different than other isolated airports,” O’Donnell said. “Pilots who fly there all the time get used to it. They may take shortcuts. Visiting pilots come in and sometimes find themselves wondering what’s going on.”

Concerns about safety and stiffer airport regulations have prompted the city of Santa Paula to start buying 18 homes built dangerously close to the runway, said Norm Wilkinson, public works director.

By doing so, the city hopes to prevent a repeat of a 1992 midair crash that sent a plane barreling through two houses at the east end of the runway. The pilot was killed. But, miraculously, a family watching television when the plane dropped through their roof was not injured.

The city prohibited the homeowners from rebuilding, and the state gave Santa Paula $250,000 to buy the two charred plots of land.

Another home deemed unsafe belongs to Diana Perales. A six-foot block wall provides the only buffer between the runway and the duplex where she and her family live.

Two years ago, an out-of-control plane skidded down the runway and smashed into the wall, just a few feet from her bedroom window.

But Perales is not frightened. On a recent morning, as her twin 5-year-old grandsons sat atop the wall watching planes buzz overhead, she explained why.

“We like the action, and there’s too many other things to worry about,” she said. “When they have the air shows, we have the best seats in the house.”

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Dangerous Skies

Fatal Plane Crashes at Santa Paula Airport, 1991-1994

1) July 3, 1994: John Forrest Lires, 44, and Erin Lires, 10, of Ojai; their Cessna 195 had engine trouble and plummeted to the ground.

2) June 21, 1994: Frank Ernest Perry Jr., 72, of Camarillo; his homemade ultralight plane stalled and plunged into the Santa Clara River.

3) Dec. 31, 1993: Michael Dirkers, 26, of North Carolina; his two-seat Grumman lost power and fell into the Santa Clara River, drowning the pilot.

4) Aug. 27, 1992: William Lewis Clark, 49, of Buttonwillow; his single-engine Cessna collided midair with another Cessna, then barreled through two houses near the runway.

5) April 3, 1991: Thomas Grist Sr., 51, of Las Vegas and David Knight, 45, of Stockton; the engine died in their home-built plane, causing the plane to fall, crash into a golf cart and explode in flames.

6) Feb. 13, 1991: Lee Manelski, 45, of Santa Paula and David Tomlinson, 18, of Thousand Oaks; their Pitts Aerobatic collided midair with a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.

Accident-Prone Airports 1984-1994

Annual Control Airport Crashes Fatalities Operations* Tower? Santa Paula 23 10 32,000 no Truckee-Tahoe 22 1 30,000 no Big Bear City 19 15 35,000 no Hesperia 17 4 22,000 no Apple Valley 12 0 70,000 no

* Estimated takeoffs and landings, 1994

Sources: National Transportation Safety Board, FAA

Researched by SARA CATANIA / Los Angeles Times