Midair Collision Over Southern California

At any given time there are a lot of small planes flying around Southern California, especially on a nice weather day like Sunday. Every now and then two of them try to occupy the same point in space at the same time:

CORONA, Calif. — Two private planes flying about a mile from an airport collided Sunday, killing at least four people as debris rained down on car dealerships below, authorities said.

The planes, both small Cessnas, collided at 3:35 p.m. about a mile from the small Corona Municipal Airport and just north of the Riverside Freeway, said FAA spokesman Allen Kenitzer.

Three of the dead were from the planes and the fourth was in a car hit by debris on the ground, Kenitzer said.

"There were bodies falling out of the sky," eyewitness Hector Hernandez told KCBS-TV. "One of them crashed into the top of a Ford Mustang, and another one fell not too far behind that one on the parking lot."

"The smaller aircraft ... just disintegrated into pieces, maybe fifty pieces coming down," eyewitness Jeff Hardin told KABC-TV. "The other aircraft pretty much stayed intact and started spiraling down and came down right behind the Nissan dealer."

Wreckage fell on car dealerships in Riverside County about 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and television pictures showed that the smashed fuselage of one of the planes landed atop a parked car.

I got my pilot's license back in 1978 and I have to admit that I had my share of close calls. One of my favorite rental airplanes from the flying club I belonged to was lost in a midair collision over the ocean a day or so before I took my license test. You have to keep your head on a swivel when you fly around here, and it was even worse when I was flying because there were a couple of other small airports that were operating in Orange County, plus the military traffic from El Toro and the Tustin helicopter base. You haven't lived until you've had a close encounter with an A4 Skyhawk on approach to El Toro or a DC-10 descending into LAX.

The good news is - I managed to miss them and they missed me.

I think the wildest flight I ever had was a weekend when I decided to fly myself and some friends to a "Fly In" at the Chino Airport, just a short hop from my home field at John Wayne Airport. Private pilots were flying in from all over the area for a day of swapping stories and looking at other aircraft both on the ground and in the air show.

I made the usual radio call to the Chino tower when we were about 5 miles out and the response I got was more than a little unusual. The controller told me to "pick a plane and follow him". All around us were private aircraft all heading the same direction.

I did as he told me and followed another Cessna into the pattern. I reported my position and airplane color of the plane in front of me (there were lots of similar looking aircraft in the pattern) and followed the guy in front of me around the pattern, made a hasty landing, skidded on the exit taxiway as I left the runway a little too fast while trying to stay out of everybody's way. No harm, no foul.

When it was time to depart, I got in line behind a bunch of other airplanes and waited my turn to get to the runway. Instead of getting a radio clearance they had a flagman standing by the runway waving the flag when it was time to go. He watched the departing plane climbing from the other end of the runway, and once that plane reached a certain height he waved the flag and off we went.

Even though there had been dozens of planes in the air near that airport, everybody was paying attention and there were no problems. A little fear tends to focus the mind. It's when you don't expect to encounter another plane that the problems usually occur.

UPDATE: Now 5 dead. Two in each plane and one poor unfortunate person on the ground.