Plane Crash in Southern California

An aircraft made what appears to be a forced landing near the Compton Airport:

At least four people were critically injured today when a twin-engine aircraft crashed into two houses in Compton as it was preparing to make a landing at a nearby airport, authorities said.

The Cessna 310 crashed about 3:55 p.m. in the 500 block of West Cypress Street, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

The plane came to rest with its tail sticking almost directly upward from the middle of one of the houses. The second house was struck by one of the plane's wings.

Compton fire officials said at least four critically injured victims, including the pilot, were taken to hospitals. It was unclear if any of those hurt were inside the houses or elsewhere on the ground.

Gregor said the aircraft was heading from San Diego to Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

Being a twin-engined aircraft, I have to assume there was some sort of fuel problem hat necessitated the forced landing (weather was not an issue today). I landed at Compton during my flight test in 1978 and managed to skid the tires turning off the runway because I was going too fast. That didn't impress my flight examiner, but he passed me anyway.

Thankfully, I kept it out of the houses.

UPDATE: One commenter doesn't like my speculation about fuel problems being the cause of the crash. I'm not a NTSB investigator, but the fact that a later story indicates that there was no post-crash fire would tend to support the idea that the plane was out of fuel when it went down.

Funny thing is, earlier this afternoon I flew over Compton Airport - not in a real plane but in Microsoft Flight Simulator. The new laptop has enough horsepower to run the latest version, so with some birthday money I bought and installed it. I'm using my desktop monitor since it's bigger, but the new machine handles the load that Flight Simulator gives it pretty well. The only time it bogged down was when I had the scenery setting on max and was flying over the Strip. Trying to build all those hotels really slowed the display down. It takes a serious video card to run that game with all the settings maxed out.