OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
12:33 PM – Thursday, November 20, 2025
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued a preliminary report on the recent deadly UPS plane crash in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Boeing MD-11F aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff, killing three crew members onboard and 11 others on the ground. 23 people were also injured in the aftermath of the crash.
Surveillance video footage shows the plane on fire, skidding to a stop in an enormous cloud of smoke.
The NTSB has released new frame-by-frame images from airport surveillance video, capturing the tragic sequence of the UPS cargo plane’s left engine detaching from the wing and arcing up and over the fuselage — igniting a fireball in the process — moments after takeoff from Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-11 freighter had barely climbed to about 30 feet, just clearing the runway-end fence, before it plummeted into a nearby storage yard, erupting in flames that engulfed two buildings, including a petroleum recycling facility.
The report found that a pylon, a structural piece that attaches the engine to the wing, had “fatigue cracks” and signs of “overstress.” The NTSB noted that the bearing that supports the connection between the engine and the wing had a fracture — though the board “found no signs of pre-existing fractures or deformations.”
It is worth noting that the plane was constructed in 1991 and had recently been serviced. Investigators described the takeoff for UPS 2976 as “uneventful” — up until the engine burst.
The NTSB’s preliminary report also notes striking parallels between the Louisville accident and the catastrophic 1979 American Airlines Flight 191 disaster, in which the left engine of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 separated during takeoff from Chicago O’Hare, causing the plane to roll and crash — killing all 271 people on board and two on the ground.
In the wake of the Louisville crash, both UPS and FedEx — the two largest remaining operators of the MD-11 — announced an immediate worldwide grounding of their MD-11 fleets. The trijet (jet aircraft powered by three jet engines) currently accounts for roughly 9% of UPS’s total airlift capacity.
The NTSB investigation remains active, with investigators now analyzing audio recovered from the cockpit voice recorder, which was retrieved from the heavily damaged wreckage.
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