The grim task of finding victims from the firestorm that followed the crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, entered a third day yesterday, as investigators gather information to determine why the aircraft caught fire and lost an engine on takeoff.
The inferno consumed the plane and spread to nearby businesses, killing at least 12 people, including a child, and leaving little hope of finding survivors in the charred area of the crash at UPS Worldport, the company’s global aviation hub.
The plane with three people aboard had been cleared for takeoff on 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.
Photo: Satellite image by Vantor / AFP
Determining why it caught fire and the engine fell off could take investigators 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 since been recovered, and the engine was discovered on the airfield, he added.
The crash and explosion had a devastating ripple effect, striking and 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, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said.
Some people who heard the boom, saw the smoke and smelled burning fuel were still stunned a day later.
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. “In that moment, I panicked. I turned around, ran through the bar screaming, telling everyone that a plane was crashing.”
The governor predicted that that death toll would rise, saying authorities were looking for a “handful of other people,” but “we do not expect to find anyone else alive.”
University of Louisville Hospital said that two people were in critical condition in its burn unit, while 18 people were treated and discharged at that hospital or other healthcare centers.
The status of the three UPS crew members aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, made in 1991, was still unknown, Beshear said.
It was not clear if they were being counted among the dead.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said a number of things could have caused the fire as the UPS plane 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 1979 crash involved a DC-10, but the MD-11 UPS plane is based on the DC-10.
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