CERRITOS, Calif. -- An Aeromexico DC-9 jetliner and a single-engine plane collided in a clear sky Sunday and hurtled into a suburban Los Angeles residential area, killing all 67 people aboard the planes and at least five people on the ground.
A wall of flame and burning debris howled through the placid subdivision 20 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The planes crashed just 8 miles from Disneyland and 3 miles from the Knott's Berry Farm amusement park.
One resident burned to death trying to save his $170,000 house with a garden hose. Parts of the two planes rained down for 10 minutes after the midday collision.
Authorities said the planes were between 6,000 and 7,000 feet high, and visibility extended 14 miles, when they collided. The Federal Aviation Administration would not comment on how they came to be in the same airspace but one airport official said he understood the small plane 'had every right to be there.'
Part of the fuselage of Aeromexico Flight 498 came to rest on Carmenita Avenue after hurtling through a concrete retaining wall. Another section protruded from the rubble of a house. They were the only recognizable pieces of the DC-9 to be seen.
Parts of bodies littered the manicured lawns and emergency workers rushed about covering them with yellow plastic bags.
They did not begin gathering the dead until sundown.
'Our people are working in teams out there and it'll be sometime tomorrow afternoon before we finish our search and have everything collected,' said Bill Gold, a spokesman for the coroner's office. 'You might have a wallet near a man's body and a handbag near a woman's body. We're being careful about moving things until we've had a chance to examine the connections.'
The death toll on the ground could rise. 'We have numerous people unaccounted for,' said Sheriff's Deputy Lynda Evans. Highway Patrol spokesman Lyle Whitten said five were known dead.
The airliner's flight recorder, which contains flight data and recordings of cockpit conversation, was recovered in a back yard on Holmes Street, authorities said. They also reported late Sunday night that they had arrested two people for looting -- one they said was robbing a damaged house and another who was picking up pieces of the airliner.
An Aeromexico official said there were 58 passengers and six crewmembers aboard Flight 498 from Mexico City, but a passenger list released late Sunday night did not indicate how many were U.S. citizens.
An official of the Mexican pilot's union said the captain of Flight 498, Arturo Valdez Prom, had flown 10,000 hours, compiling an 'excellent record.'
The airliner destroyed at least 10 houses and damaged 20 more. The Piper Tomahawk, with three people in it, fluttered to earth in a nearby schoolyard. A woman's legs protruded from a window.
'My neighbors are dead! My neighbors are dead!' screamed a hysterical woman roaming through the grisly wreckage. 'My cat is dead! The planes, my God, they disintegrated. Look at the torso over there. Oh my God.'
Eric Himes said he was watching a tennis match on television when Flight 498 smashed into the ground a few hundred feet away.
'There was a wall of flame,' Himes said. 'It was unbelievable. Bodies. Lots of bodies. Oh Christ. Have you ever been to Vietnam? That's the only thing I can equate it with.'
'It was horrible,' said Sugata Banerjee, who saw the crash from his back yard a block away. 'I saw it falling, a spiral of orange and white.'
Police Officer Phil Martinez said, 'I thought it was a balloon coming down. Then it hit and erupted in yellow and orange fire and smoke. Then I saw a smaller tail coming down.'
'I saw the jet swirling down without a tail,' said resident Joseph Rodriguez. 'I saw it nose-dive into the ground.'
More than 200 law enforcement and emergency workers from Los Angeles and Orange counties were dispatched to the disaster. More than 50 federal investigators were ordered to the scene and Aeromexico was sending an investigation team.
John Rich, an investigator with the National Air Safety Board, said controllers at El Toro Marine Station handled the the Aeromexico flight before handing it over to FAA controllers at Los Angeles International Airport three minutes before the crash.
Rich said investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to a command post near the crash to examine tapes and transcipts of communication between the Aeromexico pilots and controllers.
Rich said investigators do not yet know if the Piper was communicating with any controllers at the time of the accident. He said the plane departed Torrance Airport at 11 a.m. en route to Big Bear, Calif.
Witness David Powell said the planes collided just before noon.
'For some reason I decided to look up and I saw this little plane going straight toward the big plane and I thought, 'God, he's trying to commit suicide.'
'Then the little plane hit the big plane and it was a loud boom like a sonic boom. And then the little plane came into a spin and came fluttering down, and the big plane went straight down.'
Banerjee said he ran down the street and saw flames ignite a man clothes while he tried to wet his house with a garden hose. 'He burned to death,' he said. A woman in the area also said she saw the man die.
