UPS and FedEx said they are grounding their fleets of McDonnell Douglas MD-11 aircraft “out of an abundance of caution” following the fatal crash at UPS’ global air hub in Kentucky.
Tuesday’s crash at UPS Worldport in Louisville killed 14 people, including three pilots on an MD-11 bound for Honolulu.
MD-11s make up about 9% of the UPS Airline fleet and 4% of the FedEx fleet, the companies said.
“We made this decision proactively on the advice of the aircraft manufacturer,” UPS said 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 conducted a “thorough safety review based on the manufacturer’s 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 other U.S. cargo airline flying the MD-11, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. The airline has 16 MD-11s in its fleet, but 12 of them have already been stored. The company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment outside business hours early Saturday morning.
Boeing announced in 1998 that it would phase out production of its MD-11 jetliners, with final deliveries in 2000.
The UPS cargo plane, built in 1991, was almost airborne Tuesday when a bell rang in the cockpit, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said earlier Friday. For the next 25 seconds the bell rang and the pilots tried to control the plane as it barely lifted off the runway, its left wing on fire and missing an engine, before plowing into the ground in a spectacular fireball.
The cockpit voice recorder picked up the bell, which sounded about 37 seconds after the crew called for takeoff, Inman said. There are different types of alarms with different meanings, he said, and investigators have not determined why the bell went off, although they know the left wing was on fire and the engine on that side had separated.
Inman said it will be months before the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder is released as part of that investigative process.
Jeff Guzzetti, a retired federal accident investigator, said the bell likely signaled an engine fire.
“It happened at the moment of takeoff when they probably exceeded their speed of the decision to abort the takeoff,” Guzzetti told the AP after Inman’s news conference. “They probably exceeded their critical decision speed to stay on course and stop safely. … They’re going to have to look hard at the options that the crew may or may not have had.”
Dramatic video captured the plane crashing into the businesses and exploding in a fireball. Footage from phones, cars and security cameras provided investigators with evidence of what happened from many different angles.
Flight records indicate that the crashed UPS MD-11 underwent maintenance while it was on the ground in San Antonio for more than a month until mid-October. It is not clear what work was done.
UPS Louisville package handling facility is the largest company. The hub in the region employs more than 20,000 people, handles 300 flights a day and sorts more than 400,000 parcels an hour.
UPS Worldport operations resumed Wednesday evening with Next Day Air, or overnight sorting, spokesman Jim Mayer said.
