https://x.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930
https://xcancel.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930
Edit: just the mp4 https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1985845862409334784/pu/...
There is an incredible amount of ground damage! Just wow, this is very bad https://files.catbox.moe/3303ob.jpg
Scarily there are communities that have ignored such logic and permitted dense residential development right next to an airport.
Flying with two engines and taking off without an engine in a loaded aircraft are two very different things. A lot more thrust is needed during takeoff than after.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/ups-plane-catches-fire-and-explode...
> There is an incredible amount of ground damage!
It's fortunate it wasn't taking off the other direction, towards the adjacent downtown of Louisville (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Louisville+International+A...)
They were on fire just as they reached V1.
Plane was fully loaded with 38,000 LB of fuel for 12 hour flight to hawaii. Worst case scenario.
Pilots did the heroic thing - they tried to take off instead at 160 MPH to minimize collateral damage (highway and warehouses at the end of the runway) and crash and die somewhere else, instead of go beyond the runway at that speed. Accelerating a fully loaded jet plane at ground level beyond the runway has obvious consequences. They had one choice.
Instead, they clipped the UPS factory because they were so low, they tried to clear it but did not. Plane then hit the ground port wing down, shearing it off entirely, smearing a fireball of jet fuel across half a mile (not an exaggeration) before the plane flipped. Crew were likely dead by before this, footage shows the cockpit being slammed into the ground like a mousetrap by the flip once the port wing was gone and gravity took the starboard wing over.
Physics took over. Plane flipped and rolled upon loss of port wing, smearing a rolling fireball of the remaining fuel load from the starboard wing for another half a mile.
Louisville is now a firestorm as a result.
Respect to the flight crew; rest in peace, they made the best they could out of a really shitty scenario. They flew it all the way down.
Footage:
https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1985845987684855969?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985849267152699741?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985848132500885995?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985843126934614297?s=46
As far as the rest of my comment - watch the videos that I linked.
Let's leave that word to mean what it actually means. Louisville experienced a serious fire.
No, they were most likely NOT trying to be heores, its simply the standard thing to do. An aircraft is supposed to be able to take off with one engine inop, and at this speed the expected behaviour is to continue takeoff because that is what has been deemed safest.
There is always a grey area where the decision could go either way, stop or lift off and in this case it looks to me that trying to stop might have been better. But that is literally impossible to diagnose during the few seconds they had.
Grade A Auto Parts on Melton Ave was the initial damaged building. I don't have the name of the chemical place handy.
Med Command setup at River City Metals.
Do runways have some sort of barrier between them and the next "important" thing. It seems like that would be prudent both for cases like this, and breaking failures following landings.
Ha, Jeju Air Flight 2216 smashed into a barrier on the second landing attempt in Muan last year [0], and people commented "How could there be a barrier at the end of the runway, so obviously stupid, irresponsible", etc.
Now a plane does not smash into a barrier at the end of the runway and people suggest putting barriers at the end of the runway.
Don't mean to attack parent post, but may I suggest that
a) hordes of experts have thought long and hard about these issues, and it is unlikely that you can encounter this for the first time as a lay person and come up with a solution that has eluded the best engineers for decades ("why don't they attach a parachute to the plane?"), and
b) we are very close to an optimum in commercial aviation, and there are few if any unambiguous ("Pareto") improvements, but rather just tradeoffs. For example: You leave cockpit doors open, terrorists come in and commandeer the plane to turn it into a weapon. You lock the cockpit doors closed, and suicidal pilots lock out the rest of the crew and commandeer the plane to turn it into a weapon of mass-murder-suicide.
There are no easy answers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Air_Flight_2216
ETA: In 2007 an A320 overran a runway in Brazil and crashed into a gas station, killing 187 pax & crew + 12 on the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAM_Airlines_Flight_3054
Some do. Here is what it looks like when an overshooting plane utilizes such a barrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW71FrX8t_g
179 dead.
Consider the possibility that gigantic flying aluminum tubes filled with tons of flammable fuel hurtling around at hundreds of kilometers per hour comprise a dilemma that has no trivial answers. Even defining what "important thing" means at any given instant is not straightforward.
Many airports have this problem. The recent korean air disaster which echos this is another example. BTW, this is why most airports, if possible, point out to sea...
You also don't particularly want it to be catastrophically effective as there are real world cases where planes have clipped the fence and then NOT gone on to crash, or at least to crash in a fairly controlled manner with the majority onboard surviving. Hitting a brick wall at 180mph is going to have a 0% survival rate.
Work place related accidents always have a certain tragedy to them. Still remember when in the industrial park, my employer is located in, tanks belonging to a trash incinerator for special chemical waste exploded, taking several people with it.
It's astonishing that this is a thing. Why aren't we building airports with enough space for a plane to remain on the ground and have plenty of room to decelerate in this situation? I can understand why it can't be retro fitted to existing airports but is it a scenario that's considered at new airports? Just seems like such an absolutely basic safety step.
But that's exactly what a runway is? They're extremely long, have ample safety margins, and have "protected areas" extending out on either end, and outside of that there are regulations about what can and can't be built along the extendend runway centerlines. But jetliners are huge, heavy, fast, and designed to go long distances - the stopping distance of a fully loaded jet at full takeoff speed is measured in miles.
But no matter the margin, a plane can always crash on the wrong side of any fence. And people will always build right up to wherever you put the fence as closer to the airport is more convenient for everything airport related.
Airports also grow themselves. Some municipal airports sited for small aircraft extend their runways to handle larger planes.
>They had one choice.
>Physics took over.
>Louisville is now a firestorm as a result.
Incredible writing.
As I understand it, there is a low speed regime, under 80 knots, where are you stop for basically anything.
Then there is a high speed regime, where you only stop for serious issues, because you now have so much kinetic energy that stopping the plane, while still possible, will involve risk. (i.e. fire from overheated brakes.)
At a certain point, called V1, there’s no longer enough room to stop, no matter what your problem is. You’re either getting airborne or you’re crashing into whatever is ant the end of the runway. In general, getting airborne is the safer option, while obviously still not risk free.
However, this calculation also assumes that the engine fails in an isolated fashion, and its failure did not affect the other engines. If the failure of the left engine threw off debris that damaged the middle engine then we are now talking about a double engine failure. I’m sure the pilots knew there was a problem with the engine when they made the decision to continue, but it’s possible that problems with the middle engine weren’t apparent yet and that it only started to fail once they were committed.
Obviously, this is just speculation, and we will have to wait for the preliminary report at least.
RIP
When the plane reaches V1, pilots take the hand off the throttle: they're committed to takeoff, even if an engine fails. It is better to take off and fix the problem or land again, than to smash into whatever is beyond the end of the runway.
More specifically, V1 is the max speed at which you're about to take off, but you can still abort from. They hit that max speed and realized there was a major problem that hypothetically, they could have slowed down from, but realistically was not possible. They had no choice.
> Ground observers reported the aircraft had been delayed for about two hours for work on the left hand engine (engine #1), the engine #1 separated during the takeoff run, the center engine emitted streaks of flames, the aircraft impacted a UPS warehouse and ploughed through other facilities before coming to rest in a large plume of fire and smoke.
My IP was blocked, for some reason.
So the tl'dr is: the leading very preliminary theory is that the MD-11's left engine fell off the wing just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 (a DC-10, the immediate predecessor of the MD-11) which was caused by maintenance errors weakening the pylon structure holding the engine.
1) improper maintenance—American Airlines had used a forklift shortcut to remove the engine and pylon together, rather than following McDonnell Douglas’s prescribed method
2) The detachment tore away part of the wing’s leading edge, rupturing hydraulic lines and severing electrical power to key systems, including the slat-position indicator and stall warning (stick shaker).
3) The pilots followed the standard engine-out procedure and reduced airspeed to V₂, which caused the aircraft to stall and roll uncontrollably left. This procedure was later found out to be incorrect.
Defective maintenance practices, inadequate oversight, vulnerabilities in DC-10 design, and unsafe training procedures combined to cause the crash, killing all 273 people on board and leading to sweeping reforms in airline maintenance and certification standards.
What strikes me as odd is that this looks like the "naked" engine, without the cowling/nacelle that usually surrounds it? Anyway, if an engine departs the aircraft shortly after (last-minute) maintenance was performed on it, that's indeed suspicious...
Best advice is always to wait for authoritative statements.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/669082-ups-md11...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance...
TDLR 10-20 years ago, the US started allowing maintenance of domestic planes in foreign countries, outside the reach of the FAA’s inspections
See also how FAA allowed Boeing to oversee its own certification for MAX.
The 737 Max crashes were also so frequently explained by online commenters as because of “outsourced software engineers” and so on.
But the FAA/NTSB always comes through with fact finding despite the immense political pressure to find these facile explanations. Organizationally, someone once designed these things well, and subsequently it has been preserved so well.
When I see so many American institutions turned to partisan causes through an escalation of “well, they’re doing it” it’s pretty wild that this org remains trustworthy. Wild.
Either way, to say it's "likely relevant" is a huge leap. We have no idea what caused the crash - it could be a million things and likely some combintation of them.
There are foreign planes entering US airspace every day, carrying thousands of passengers. They are also serviced by foreign technicians, outside the reach of the FAA's inspections, and they seem to be doing just fine.
"Foreign" in itself isn't bad, you just need to choose/require reputable partners. If you outsource your maintenance to the same crews that maintain jets for Polish LOT or Taiwanese China Airlines, you may save some money and yet get excellent service, as those airlines aren't known for having safety problems.
Kosovo or South Sudan would be a different story.
Foreign Repair Stations date back to the 90s [1], the thing is they need to be supervised by an FAA Certified Mechanic. Inspection of these was already a hot issue in the early '00s... No one gave a fuck, it was all about saving costs for a very long time.
The linked 2007 report's second page (!) already leads with this:
> Since 2001, eight commercial air carriers have gone through bankruptcy and one has ceased operations. Fuel prices remain high, and this makes cost control a key factor in both the sustained profitability and overall survival of an airline.
IMHO, this is a perfect example why the government needs to regulate prices in safety-critical industries. The "race to the bottom" must be prevented - sorry, flying NYC-SFO for 70$, that's not sustainable.
[1] https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/Web_File_Foreign...
Firstly, fuck you.
Second, this shop consistently rated higher across all metrics, including those inside the US. Loss time injury rates measured in the millions of man hours.
Third, 80% of my job whilst there was to build software for QA and their rigourous on-going inspection reigeme that included yearly in person audits lasting weeks from FAA inspectors, EASA inspectors and every other country and airline this base overhauled.
Take your uninformed bs and hit the road. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and insinuating that they're outside the reach of the FAA shows you know exactly 0 about the certification process that keeps millions of people safe on a daily basis.
Every time I board a plane, I think what a crazy thing I am doing, but then I remember that I could be safe and snug in my house and still be in a plane crash.
To be fair, statistically, your living room is far more dangerous than the cabin of an airplane.
According to Garp, you just need to buy a pre-disastered home. You'll be safe there.[^1]
(Unfortunately his logic is flawed.[^2])
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3TuoGVNbBs
[^2]: https://xkcd.com/795/
Like a dash cam, they can save the footage only if there is a problem. Surely that would be much better than splicing together many third party camera recordings.
The NTSB (and many of their non-US counterparts) are incredibly adept at accident investigation using debris, black boxes and CVRs. Even in cases where the black boxes are damaged and video evidence is available, the video evidence is usually not so helpful as to be able to determine a root cause.
If you take into account that the cameras would be mostly useless in low-light or poor visibility conditions, and the costs associated with maintaining a nationwide network of high-res cameras that cover all runways at all major commercial airports (and ensures their lines of sight and operation through the never-ending renovations going on at these airports), I'm not sure that the benefits of having the cameras make sense.
If Flock is going to retain footage indefinitely, why not the FAA/airport, to?
An NFL game has a ton of cameras, a ton of camera operators, those fancy cameras on wire things, an onsite editing crew, and an audience.
To get good recordings, you'd need to invest a lot of time and money, and very few of the recordings would ever be watched. Doesn't seem worth the investment given third party recording seem to turn up quite often and video isn't terribly necessary for the investigation.
It doesn't seem to be such a terrible idea, though i do stand to be corrected.
High quality cameras are actually really rare and expensive.
This is absolutely archaic thinking.
Reminds me of when I worked in data centers, pre-Snowden, and the official position on recording was how could we possible afford enough hard drives to store everything?!.
They were on fire just as they reached V1.
Plane was fully loaded with 38,000 LB of fuel for 12 hour flight to hawaii. Worst case scenario.
Pilots did the heroic thing - they tried to take off instead of accelerate past the runway at ground level at 160 MPH to minimize collateral damage (highway and warehouses at the end of the runway) and crash and die somewhere else.
Instead, they clipped the UPS factory because they were so low, they tried to clear it but did not. Plane then hit the ground port wing down, shearing it off entirely, smearing a fireball of jet fuel across half a mile (not an exaggeration) before the plane flipped. Crew were likely dead by then, footage shows the cockpit being slammed into the ground by the flip once the port wing was gone and gravity took the starboard wing over.
Plane flipped, continued to smear half of the fuel load for another half a mile.
Louisville is now a firestorm as a result.
Footage:
https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1985845987684855969?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985849267152699741?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985848132500885995?s=46
https://x.com/faytuksnetwork/status/1985843126934614297?s=46
To know this, they would have to know they had lost multiple engines. Clearly this is the case by the end, but it's not clear who realized what at what time.
The NTSB investigation will bring more light.
Oh I guess it was 2004, not 2005.
Yes, Perfect Landing is a great restaurant!
Some people are gonna have to live with that for the rest of their lives. Not putting blame on humans here, but hopefully this triggers a tightening of procedures, as these kind of tragedies tend to.
[1]: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/flight-tracking-news/majo...
Wide-body (long-haul) airplanes are generally limited by flying hours since they rarely reach their maximum allowed flight cycles.
In contrast, wide-body cargo planes typically fly shorter legs compared to when they are used as passenger carriers. And as a result, they are much more likely to hit their critical cycle limit.
Excellent edge-case for IFTTT thermostat. Localized air quality alert --> Intake offline.
- Shirley Jackson
If you have a long runway and a long runout, you have a much higher V1 than a short runway with tall clearance right at the end, right?
Looks really nasty. It seems to have come down in an industrial area, which will significantly reduce casualties. I can’t even imagine this, in a residential area.
I do expect this incident will accelerate the retirement of the balance of the fleet that is still flying and the MD11 will complete its disappearance from the skies in the US before the end of the decade.
https://simpleflying.com/why-mcdonnell-dougls-md-11-wont-be-...
40+ people died in that one, it's a miracle it wasn't more.
> It departed from runway 01L Zwanenburgbaan (now known as runway 36C)
Magnetic field change?
It seems like it happened fairly late in the sequence. Not sure how much of a difference it would have made.
> I pray they did not use a forklift for the installation of the engine, onwing.
Does anyone understand that? Why wouldn't you use a forklift? Why would that lead to an engine falling off? It seems like you'd need to support the 10,000 lbs engine somehow when reattaching it.
https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accid...
I watch a lot of airplane disasters.
TLDR: you are supposed to properly disassemble and use a proper lift to lower the engine, not shove it in with a fork lift (even though it's quicker).
I don't think this was the cause of this accident though, the engine was on fire before takeoff.
Not an airplane engineer, but I very much doubt anyone has used a forklift to install an engine since 191. Procedures got much more strict.
Well-maintained planes don't do that.
