A UPS cargo plane crashed and exploded into a massive fireball shortly after takeoff from the company’s global aviation hub here Tuesday evening, resulting in at least seven fatalities and eleven injuries, authorities confirmed.
The crash occurred just before sundown adjacent to the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. The resulting inferno ignited a series of ground fires in a nearby industrial corridor, creating a sprawling emergency scene that forced a full halt to airport operations through the night.
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, in a late-night news conference, provided a grim breakdown of the casualties, stating that four of the seven deceased victims were not on the aircraft. The plane itself had a crew of three on board.
Emergency response to the scene was massive, with more than a hundred firefighters from across the region working to contain the blaze and search for survivors across a crash site that spanned hundreds of meters. Officials noted that crews were still dealing with hot spots hours after the initial impact.
“The fire now is almost entirely contained,” a fire department spokesperson said at the conference. “When you have such a large-scale incident and fire that spread over such a massive area, we have to use hundreds of personnel to surround it, contain it, and then slowly bring it in. That has happened.”
The force of the explosion was likened by aviation experts to a bomb, a consequence of the large amount of jet fuel the aircraft was carrying at the time of takeoff.
Road closures remained in effect around the crash site as search and recovery operations continued. Mayor Greenberg indicated that the death toll was consistent with their current understanding of the tragedy, but that crews were still actively searching the area.
“We’re waiting to get final word that next of kin had been notified,” Greenberg said, “but we wanted to get information out as soon as we possibly could.”
The cause of the crash is not yet known and is expected to be the focus of a federal investigation.