LOUISVILLE, KY. — UPS and FedEx said they are grounding their fleet of McDonnell Douglas MD-11 aircraft “out of an abundance of caution” following the deadly UPS crash. global aviation hub in Kentucky.
Tuesday crash at UPS Worldport in Louisville killed 14 peopleincluding three MD-11 pilots bound for Honolulu.
MD-11s make up about 9% of UPS's fleet and 4% of FedEx's fleet, the companies said.
“We made this decision early on the advice of the aircraft manufacturer,” UPS said in a statement late Friday. “Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees and the communities we serve.”
FedEx said in an email that it would ground the planes while it conducts a “thorough safety review based on manufacturer recommendations.”
Boeing, which merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press asking about the reasons for the recommendation.
Western Global Airlines is the only U.S. cargo airline that flies the MD-11, according to aviation analytics company Cirium. The airline has 16 MD-11 aircraft in its fleet, but 12 of them have already been stored. The company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment after hours early Saturday morning.
In 1998, Boeing announced it would phase out production of the MD-11 jetliner, with final deliveries expected to take place in 2000.
The UPS cargo plane, built in 1991, was nearly airborne Tuesday when a bell sounded in the cockpit, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said earlier Friday. Over the next 25 seconds, the bell rang and the pilots tried to control the plane, which was barely getting off the runway, its left wing on fire and its engine missing, and then crashed into the ground in a spectacular fireball.
The cockpit voice recorder recorded a call that sounded about 37 seconds after the crew requested takeoff thrust, Inman said. There are different types of alarms with different meanings, he said, and investigators have not determined why the bell sounded, although they know the left fender was on fire and the engine on that side had become detached.
Inman said it will be months before a transcript of the cockpit recording is made public as part of the investigation process.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said the call likely signaled an engine fire.
“This happened at a point in takeoff where they were probably already over the speed limit for making the decision to abort takeoff,” Guzzetti told The Associated Press after Inman's news conference. “They have likely already exceeded the critical decision speed to stay on the runway and stop safely… They will need to carefully consider the options that the crew may or may not have had.”
Dramatic video A plane was captured crashing into a business and exploding in a fireball. Footage from phones, cars and CCTV cameras provided investigators with evidence from multiple angles of what happened.
The crashed UPS MD-11 was undergoing maintenance while on the ground in San Antonio for more than a month until mid-October, according to flight records. It is unclear what work was done.
UPS Parcel Processing Center in Louisville. is the largest in the company. The hub employs more than 20,000 people in the region, handles 300 flights daily and sorts more than 400,000 parcels per hour.
UPS World Port operations resumed Operation Next Day Air, or overnight operations, will take place Wednesday evening, company spokesman Jim Mayer said.
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Golden reported from Seattle.
