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Five Injured as Plane Crashes into California Homes
Five people were injured, four critically, Saturday afternoon when a twin-engine aircraft crashed nose first into a Compton house and sliced into the one next door with one of its wings, authorities said.
The Cessna 310 crashed just before 4 p.m. in the 500 block of West Cypress Street, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The craft came to rest with its tail sticking almost directly upward from the middle of one of the houses in a neighborhood of spacious, modern homes.
The plane, which was registered in Nevada, was heading from San Diego to Hawthorne Municipal Airport, Gregor said. It was about a mile and a half away from Compton/Woodley Airport, a general aviation field, but he said it was unclear whether the pilot was trying to make an emergency landing.
Compton Deputy Fire Chief Marcel Melanson said two of the injured were the plane's occupants and three were on the ground.
He said some had already been pulled out of the house by the time firefighters arrived. All were taken to area hospitals.
A neighbor, Kenneth Wyatt, 48, said he was sitting in his house watching TV when he heard an enormous thud.
"It shook my house," he said. After running outside, he initially saw nothing. Then he saw the debris and smoke.
"An airplane had come through the roof of my neighbor's home," he said, still incredulous.
Wyatt said he saw a young woman -- the daughter of one of the house's renters -- at the window yelling for help.
He and two other people tried to open the door of the badly damaged house but couldn't get it to budge. They helped the young woman out a window, and when she said her mother was inside, they clambered through the window themselves to search for her.
"I saw the pilot, so we got him out," Wyatt said.
Then he spotted one of the residents of the house moving under the rubble. Several people struggled to move that man out of the home through a sliding-glass door.
"You could smell the fumes," said Wyatt, his jeans stained with the blood of the injured whom he helped. His own house was spared structural damage. But his backyard gazebo was ruined by debris from the aircraft, he said.
"It's not the first time we've seen someone pulled out of a plane," said Wyatt, who has lived in Compton since childhood.
A Cessna went down on Alondra Boulevard in March 2006, slightly injuring a flight instructor and student pilot. A pilot was killed in January 2004 when his home-built Thorp T-18 crash-landed on a runway after being caught in the downwash of air from a hovering helicopter. Another pilot was slightly injured in January 2000 when his homemade Dragon Fly clipped a hangar and hit several parked police cars.
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Times staff writer Deborah Schoch contributed to this report.
