KENTUCKY — UPS has announced that it is temporarily grounding its MD-11 fleet following a fiery crash that killed 12 in Kentucky earlier this week.
A plane with three people aboard crashed about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday as it was departing for Honolulu from UPS Worldport at the Louisville, Kentucky airport.
The crash had a devastating ripple effect, striking and causing smaller explosions at Kentucky Petroleum Recycling and hitting an auto salvage yard, Grade A Auto Parts.
The three people on board were pronounced dead immediately, and first responders discovered people who were on the ground and killed in the impact of the crash, which included a child who was with a parent at the parts business.
As of Nov. 7, 12 people were pronounced dead. The death toll is expected to rise.
Airport security video “shows the left engine detaching from the wing during the takeoff roll,” according to Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is leading the investigation.
As a precaution, UPS announced that it is grounding all of its MD-11 flights--the same type of airplane as the one involved in Tuesday’s crash.
According to UPS, MD-11s are approximately 9% of the UPS Airlines fleet.
In a statement, UPS said:
“Out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of safety, we have made the decision to temporarily ground our MD-11 fleet. MD-11s are approximately 9% of the UPS Airlines fleet. The grounding is effective immediately. We made this decision proactively at the recommendation of the aircraft manufacturer. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees and the communities we serve.
Contingency plans are in place to ensure we can continue to deliver the reliable service our customers around the world count on."
The Louisville package handling facility is the company’s largest. The hub employs more than 20,000 people in the region, handles 300 flights daily and sorts more than 400,000 packages an hour.
The NTSB will now try to determine what caused the fire and why the engine fell off. It will likely take investigators more than a year to answer those questions.
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