Federal investigators released dramatic photos Thursday of an engine flying off a doomed UPS cargo plane that crashed two weeks ago in Kentucky, killing 14 people, and said there was evidence of cracks in the left wing's engine mount.
A series of six photos the National Transportation Safety Board released showed the rear of the engine starting to detach before it flew up and over the wing as flames erupted. The next image shows the wing engulfed by fire as the burning engine flies above it. The last image shows the plane starting to get airborne.
But the MD-11 plane only got 30 feet (9.1 meters) off the ground, the NTSB said, citing the flight data recorder in its first formal but preliminary report about the Nov. 4 disaster in Louisville, Kentucky.
Three pilots on the plane were killed along with 11 more people on the ground near Muhammad Ali International Airport.
The NTSB said the plane was not due yet for a detailed inspection of key engine mount parts that had fractures. It still needed to complete nearly 7,000 more takeoffs and landings. It was last examined in October 2021.
“It appears UPS was conducting this maintenance within the required time frame, but I’m sure the FAA is now going to ponder whether that time frame is adequate,” aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti told The Associated Press after reading the report.
It's not clear when the cracks started to develop on the 34-year-old plane and whether they could have been missed in that earlier inspection. Another aviation expert, John Cox, said “this is normal wear and tear on an aircraft.” A metal part like the engine mount that vibrates so much every time the plane flies will eventually develop cracks over time. Cox said it's just a question of how often those parts need to be inspected and what maintenance is required.
The entire fleet of MD-11s operated by UPS, FedEx and Western Global — along with a few related DC-10s — were grounded after this crash until they can be inspected and repaired, but the Federal Aviation Administration hasn't yet determined what will be required. Cox said those airlines will have to decide whether it is even worth repairing these planes when they were already planning to retire them in the next few years anyway.
“If you have to pull the engines off and do some sort of visual inspection or replacement, that’s going to run into a significant cost. And they’re going to have to make some hard decisions,” Cox said.
These MD-11 aircraft make up about 9% of the UPS airline fleet and 4% of the FedEx fleet, the companies have said.
Earlier this week, Bill Moore, president of UPS Airlines, an arm of UPS, said the company is working with investigators to determine the “root cause” of the crash.
“Once we determine that, then they’ll be able to develop an inspection plan,” Moore said at a news conference in Louisville. “Can we inspect it? If so, how do we repair it? How do we put it back together? And then eventually return the fleet to service. But that’s not going to happen quickly.”
Guzzetti said the photos of this crash appear strikingly similar to the way the same engine came off an American Airlines plane in 1979, causing a crash that killed 273. But this preliminary report makes clear that a different part failed in this crash. NTSB determined that improper maintenance caused the 1979 crash when mechanics used a fork lift to lift the engine back up. Guzzetti said it doesn’t appear from this initial report that the mechanics did something wrong when this UPS plane underwent heavy maintenance the month before this crash.
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Associated Press writer Bruce Schriener contributed to this report.
