Louisville, Kentucky– The grim task of finding victims of the firestorm that followed the crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, entered its third day Thursday as investigators gathered information to determine why the plane caught fire and lost its engine on takeoff.
The fire consumed the massive plane and spread to nearby businesses, killing at least 12 people, including a child, and leaving little hope of finding survivors at the charred site of the plane crash at UPS Worldport, the company’s global aviation hub.
Mayor Craig Greenberg said Thursday that there are now nine people missing after officials were able to locate six people in the wreckage.
Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, who is leading the investigation, said the plane with three people on board was ready for takeoff on Tuesday when a large fire broke out in its left wing. But determining the cause of the fire and the engine failure may take investigators more than a year.
The plane rose high enough to clear the fence at the end of the runway before crashing outside Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, Inman said. He added that the cockpit voice recorder and data recorder were recovered, and the engine was discovered at the airport.
The accident and explosion had a devastating ripple effect, causing smaller explosions at the Kentucky Petroleum Recycling Company and hitting an auto salvage yard. The slain child was with one of his parents at the salvage yard, according to Gov. Andy Beshear.
Some people who heard the explosion, saw smoke and smelled burning fuel remained stunned a day later.
Kayla Kenady, a bartender at the Stooges Bar and Grill, said the lights suddenly flickered as she was taking a beer to a customer on the patio.
“I saw a plane in the sky landing over our volleyball courts, engulfed in flames,” she said on Wednesday. “At that moment, I panicked. I turned around, ran through the bar screaming, telling everyone a plane was crashing.”
The governor expected the death toll to rise, saying that the authorities were looking for “a handful of other people,” but “we do not expect to find anyone else alive.”
University of Louisville Hospital said two people were in critical condition in the burn unit. Eighteen people were treated and released from this hospital and medical facilities.
The airport is located 7 miles (11 kilometers) from downtown Louisville, close to the Indiana state line, residential areas, a water park, and museums. The airport resumed operations on Wednesday.
The status of the three UPS crew members aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 plane, which was manufactured in 1991, remains unknown, according to Bashir. It was not clear whether they were being counted among the dead.
UPS said it was “deeply saddened.”
The parcel handling facility in Louisville is the company’s largest. The center employs more than 20,000 people in the region, handles 300 flights a day and sorts more than 400,000 parcels per hour.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said a number of things may have caused the fire as the UPS plane was rolling down the runway.
“It could have been a partial engine out that ruptured the fuel lines. Or it could have been a fuel leak that ignited the engine and then burned,” Guzzetti said.
He added that the accident bears many similarities to an accident that occurred in 1979 when the left engine fell off an American Airlines plane as it was departing from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, killing 273 people.
The plane and the UPS plane were equipped with the same General Electric engines and both planes underwent extensive maintenance in the month before their crash, Guzzetti said. The NTSB blamed the Chicago crash on improper maintenance. The 1979 crash involved a DC-10; The MD-11 UPS aircraft is based on the DC-10.
Flight records show that the UPS plane was on the ground in San Antonio from September 3 to October 18, but it was not clear what maintenance was performed and whether it had any impact on the accident.
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