LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A UPS cargo plane crashed Tuesday at an airport in Louisville, Kentucky, where the company operates its largest package delivery hub.
UPS calls the giant center Worldport.
Here’s what to know about its enormous scale:
Processes 2 million packages per day
The facility at Muhammad Ali International Airport sprawls across an area the size of 90 football fields.
It processes 2 million packages per day, but has the ability to handle even more. It has the capacity to process 416,000 packages and documents per hour if needed.
The Louisville airport ranks third among U.S. airports for cargo as measured by weight, after Memphis, Tennessee, and Anchorage, Alaska, according to Airports Council International World.
A UPS town
Some 20,000 people work at the center, making UPS the largest employer in the Louisville area, the company said on its website.
Louisville Metro Council member Betsy Ruhe said everyone in town knows someone who works at UPS.
“My heart goes out to everybody at UPS because this is a UPS town,” Ruhe said. “My cousin’s a UPS pilot. My aide’s tennis partner is a UPS pilot. The intern in my office works overnight at UPS to pay for college.”
Hundreds of flights per day
More than 300 flights take off and land from the facility each day..
A time-lapse video UPS posted on YouTube shows planes taxiing to and from special cargo gates. Workers unload containers packed with cardboard boxes. Other employees load the boxes onto a conveyor belt, which delivers packages to workers who load them into other containers.
The center has room for 125 aircraft to park.
Louisville’s location in Kentucky puts it within four hours of flight time to 95% of the U.S. population. It serves 200 countries around the world.
UPS flies six different types of planes in the U.S.
It has 27 MD-11s, which is the model that crashed on Tuesday. It also flies the Airbus A300-600 and four different types of Boeing jets: the 757-200, 767-300, 747-400 and 747-8.
Expansions in Louisville
UPS made Louisville an air cargo hub starting in the 1980s. It opened the package sorting center it calls Worldport in 2002. The public media outlet Marketplace reported UPS picked the city because it doesn’t get a lot of extreme heat or snow and because it’s centrally located.
The hub has steadily grown over the decades. Last year, UPS opened a new $220 million aircraft hangar in Louisville large enough to park two 747 planes side by side. The investment tripled the company’s maintenance footprint for the plane at the airport.
In 2022 it announced plans to add eight new flight simulators.
UPS Healthcare, which provides shipments for clinical trials, shipments to medical care patients and other services, was due to get two new buildings in the expansion.
UPS gets permission to fly its own planes in 1988
UPS got its start in Seattle in 1907, when two teenagers started American Messenger Co. The name United Parcel Service debuted in 1919.
The company won Federal Aviation Administration approval to operate its own aircraft in 1988.
Headquartered in Atlanta, UPS today employs about 490,000 people worldwide.
