the Fiery crash A UPS plane crash shortly after its left engine flew off its wing and caused a massive fire during takeoff could spell the end for the remaining 109 MD-11 planes that have been carrying cargo exclusively for more than a decade.
The fate of the planes will be decided only after UPS, FedEx and Western Global see how expensive repairs the FAA will require and find out if there is a fatal flaw in their design. Package delivery companies may already be thinking about retiring their MD-11 planes — which are on average more than 30 years old — over the next few years and replacing them with newer, safer, more efficient planes. Federal Aviation Administration All MD-11s were grounded The ten DC-10 aircraft remaining after the accident.
Fourteen people — including three cabin crew — He died After the plane crashed in Several businesses outside Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4. The plane rose only 30 feet (9 m) into the air.
Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said it probably wouldn’t be worth repairing planes when better options were available from Boeing and Airbus, even though manufacturers have such a backlog that getting a plane back on order takes years. However, it will depend on what exactly investigators find.
“For them to order inspections and shut them down as easily as they did makes me think they’re concerned about them,” Schiavo said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that its investigators discovered cracks in key parts that failed to keep the back of the engine attached to the wing of the UPS plane. This accident reminded experts of the 1979 disaster that killed 273 people after the left engine of an American Airlines plane jumped up and over its wing after takeoff in Chicago.
This accident grounded 274 DC-10s, the predecessor to the MD-11, from flying around the world. The airline’s pole was allowed to return to the sky because the NTSB determined that maintenance workers improperly used a forklift to reconnect the engine, damaging the plane that crashed. This means that the accident was not due to a fatal design flaw although there have been a number of accidents involving DC-10 aircraft already.
The lugs that the NTSB said cracked and failed in the crash earlier this month are located near the part that failed in the 1979 crash, but they are different. Investigators will have to determine whether the UPS plane had a common fault with other MD-11 planes or whether the problem that caused the engine to go down was unique to the plane.
An FAA spokesman said the agency is working with the NTSB and Boeing, which bought the company that made the MD-11 planes in 1997, to determine what to do.
The DC-10 and MD-11 have some of the highest accident rates among commercial aircraft, according to statistics published annually by Boeing. Twice in the 1970s, a DC-10 lost its rear cargo door in flight. The second time was in 1974 and caused a crash outside Paris that killed 346 people. But airlines have loved the DC-10s for years, and the Air Force maintains a fleet of dozens of tankers based on the DC-10s it flew for decades before retiring them from service last year.
Former independent aircraft company McDonnell Douglas announced the MD-11 in 1984. The three-engined aircraft looked promising with its greater capacity and longer range than the DC-10, but its performance did not fully live up to expectations, and it was outperformed by newer aircraft from Boeing and Airbus. Schiavo said the MD-11 was “practically obsolete” when it was introduced compared to twin-engine planes, which are cheaper to operate. Only 200 MD-11s were built between 1988 and 2000.
Most MD-11s began carrying passengers, but airlines eventually decided to retire the model in favor of other aircraft. The last MD-11 passenger flight of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines took place in 2014.
The MD-11s make up about 9% of the UPS fleet and 4% of the FedEx fleet, the companies said. Western Global only has 16 MD-11s.
“I think there is still more useful life in them,” said aviation journalist Wolfgang Borgmann, who devoted one of his books, “Legends of Aviation,” to the history of the MD-11 and DC-10. He pointed to B-52 bombers, which remain the Air Force’s flagship aircraft despite debuting in 1955.
“Age doesn’t matter in aviation. What matters is maintenance,” said Borgmann, editor-in-chief of Aero International magazine in Germany.
Investigators are looking closely at the UPS plane’s maintenance history. The NTSB said the last time its engines had a detailed inspection was in 2021. A similar inspection was not performed during the extended maintenance the plane underwent the month before the crash, and the plane was not scheduled to undergo another in-depth engine inspection until after nearly 7,000 more flights. Boeing and the FAA will have to determine whether the current maintenance schedule is adequate.