LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The grim task of finding and identifying victims from the firestorm that followed a UPS cargo plane crash in Louisville, Kentucky, entered a third day Thursday as investigators gathered information to determine why the aircraft caught fire and lost an engine on takeoff.
The inferno consumed the enormous plane and spread to nearby businesses, killing at least 12 people, including a child and three UPS crew on the plane, and ending any hope of finding survivors in the crash at UPS Worldport, the company’s global aviation hub.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg described the scene as “horrific,” with charred, mangled metal and “still some smoke rising from piles of debris.”
“You hear people say, ‘Oh, you only see that in the movies.’ This was worse than the movies,” Greenberg told reporters.
Meanwhile, UPS Worldport operations resumed Wednesday night with its Next Day Air, or night sort, operation, spokesperson Jim Mayer said.
“Our goal is to begin returning the network to a normal cadence. Outbound flights from Louisville arrived at destinations this morning,” Mayer said.
The plane that crashed had been cleared for takeoff Tuesday when a large fire developed in the left wing, said Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation. But determining why it caught fire and why the engine fell off could take more than a year.
The plane gained enough altitude to clear the fence at the end of the runway before crashing just outside Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, Inman said. The cockpit voice recorder and data recorder have been recovered, and the engine was discovered on the airfield, he said.
The search at the crash site continued Thursday while the coroner’s office worked to identify remains and confirm whether everyone who was reported unaccounted for has been found, the Louisville mayor said.
“Our hope is that we have located all of the victims at this point. But again, we do not know,” Greenberg said.
The crash and explosion had a devastating ripple effect, causing smaller blasts at Kentucky Petroleum Recycling and hitting an auto salvage yard. The child who was killed was with a parent at the salvage yard, according to Gov. Andy Beshear.
University of Louisville Hospital said Wednesday that two people were in critical condition in the burn unit. Eighteen people were treated and discharged at that hospital and medical facilities.
People who heard the boom, saw the smoke and smelled burning fuel were stunned.
Stooges Bar and Grill bartender Kyla Kenady said lights suddenly flickered as she took a beer to a customer on the patio.
“I saw a plane in the sky coming down over top of our volleyball courts in flames,” she said Wednesday. “In that moment, I panicked. I turned around, ran through the bar screaming, telling everyone that a plane was crashing.”
UPS said it was “terribly saddened.” 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.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said a number of things could have caused the fire as the plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, made in 1991, was rolling down the runway.
“It could have been the engine partially coming off and ripping out fuel lines. Or it could have been a fuel leak igniting and then burning the engine off,” Guzzetti said.
The crash bears a lot of similarities to one in 1979 when the left engine fell off an American Airlines jet as it was departing Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, killing 273 people, he said.
Guzzetti said that jet and the UPS plane were equipped with the same General Electric engines and both planes underwent heavy maintenance in the month before they crashed. The NTSB blamed the Chicago crash on improper maintenance. The 1979 crash involved a DC-10; the MD-11 UPS plane is based on the DC-10.
Flight records show the UPS plane was on the ground in San Antonio from Sept. 3 to Oct. 18, but it was unclear what maintenance was performed and if it had any impact on the crash.
