Plane Crash in Louisville

[Yazata]

Just happened a few minutes ago. Nothing official yet, but talk on X is that it was a UPS cargo plane that went down for unknown reasons short of the runway. Local emergency services are telling everyone to stay away.

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The plane was an MD-11 operated by UPS as a cargo aircraft. It appears to have crashed right after takeoff. Video of the crash shows the plane's left wing already on fire as it went down.

The plane was fully laden with fuel when it went down and there is a lot of fire on the ground, in the industrial-looking part of Louisville where it impacted. So not only were the pilots killed, but there are likely casualties on the ground as well.

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[Yazata]

The plane that crashed was headed from the UPS base in Louisville to Honolulu. It appears to have suffered some kind of emergency during its takeoff roll that lit its left wing on fire, perhaps an engine violently coming apart, after it was going too fast to abort the takeoff. Speculation is that it lost a second engine (out of three) as it was climbing out, perhaps because it had ingested debris. Fully laden and with just one functioning engine, it stalled out and bellyflopped into the buildings below.

This is the plane (photo from Flightradar24)

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[Yazata]

Video of the crash from a truck driver's dash-cam.

https://x.com/AZ_Intel_/status/1985929819117289852

What looks like part of an engine cowling is visible on the left side of the runway the plane departed from. That does suggest that it suffered an uncontained engine failure during the takeoff roll. That might well have thrown engine fragments into the rear tail engine, leaving only the right wing engine still running.

Latest count is seven dead, including all three on the plane and four on the ground. The death toll on the ground is likely to rise as searches progress.

[C C]

Video of the crash from a truck driver's dash-cam.

https://x.com/AZ_Intel_/status/1985929819117289852

What looks like part of an engine cowling is visible on the left side of the runway the plane departed from. That does suggest that it suffered an uncontained engine failure during the takeoff roll. That might well have thrown engine fragments into the rear tail engine, leaving only the right wing engine still running.

Latest count is seven dead, including all three on the plane and four on the ground. The death toll on the ground is likely to rise as searches progress.

That explains the long trail of destruction. For some odd reason, I reflexively consider a fuel-laden jet as completely blowing upon impact, rather than skidding on an urgent path to take out as much of its surroundings as it can.

[Yazata]

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued a preliminary report.

Imagery shows the takeoff proceeding normally until the plane rotated nose up to become airborne. At that point the left engine breaks loose from the wing. Severed fuel lines caught on fire. The loose engine jetted away and ended up next to the runway. Flame and possibly debris is visible entering the tail engine. The aircraft never reached an altitude of more than 30 feet. It barely missed the fence at the end of the runway. Its left landing gear dragged across the roof of a UPS warehouse next to the airport, then it bellied into two additional buildings and an oil recycling facility and was consumed by fire.

Examination of the fracture surfaces of the engine pylon showed evidence of metal fatigue cracks.

Details here:

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Page...MA024.aspx

This is just a preliminary report and investigation continues.

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[Zinjanthropos]

Was it the big no-no? Could maintenance crews have used a forklift to mount engines, thus creating hairline cracks in pylon that eventually became bigger? It’s just that I saw that on Mayday once.

[Syne]

More likely it was lax inspection routines, especially on an older plane like this one.

[Zinjanthropos]

More likely it was lax inspection routines, especially on an older plane like this one.

Wonder if robots complete with the most sophisticated and sensitive equipment in the world could inspect a plane better than humans? Not sure if they could physically fix a problem however, but they could inspect the work done.

[stryder]

More likely it was lax inspection routines, especially on an older plane like this one.

Wonder if robots complete with the most sophisticated and sensitive equipment in the world could inspect a plane better than humans? Not sure if they could physically fix a problem however, but they could inspect the work done.

Ultrasonic testing (wikipedia.org) would likely need further development to be beyond just localised testing to handle aircraft. Perhaps something similar to LIDAR could be done at airports so you have a constant updated model of stress changes to aircraft.

[Syne]

Airlines test for metal fatigue using a combination of methods, including non-destructive testing (NDT) like ultrasonic and X-ray inspections to find hidden cracks, and visual and auditory inspections to spot surface damage or listen for unusual sounds. They also use dye penetrant and magnetic particle tests to make tiny cracks visible and compare the aircraft's actual stress history against historical data to predict and monitor fatigue development.
- Google AI