(Washington) A cargo plane with three people on board crashed Tuesday shortly after takeoff from the US airport in Louisville, Kentucky, where it exploded in a fireball.
“UPS Flight 2976 crashed around 5:15 p.m. local time,” the US aviation regulator, the FAA, said, identifying the plane as a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 bound for Hawaii.
The plane had “three crew members on board,” said in a separate statement the carrier UPS, whose airline division headquarters is located in Louisville, in the east-central part of the country.
“There are several injured and the fire is still ongoing,” Mayor Craig Greenberg said on X.
Aerial images from local television shows a large blaze stretching several hundred meters long in an area of hangars and parking lots, with the flashing lights of rescue teams nearby.
The American Transportation Safety Agency (NTSB) and the FAA “are mobilizing to arrive on site and will conduct the investigation,” wrote Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transport, on X.
An amateur video shared by local channel WLKY shows the plane’s left engine on fire while the plane skims the ground while trying to take off, before visibly exploding, causing a large plume of black smoke.
In the midst of budgetary paralysis
Tuesday’s accident comes at a time when the consequences of the budgetary paralysis, due to a disagreement between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, are being particularly felt in the field of air transport.
For several weeks, there have been shortages of air traffic controllers – who have been working since 1er October without being paid – leading to delays and cancellations of flights across the country.
If the budgetary paralysis continues beyond this week, American airspace could even be partially closed, Sean Duffy warned on Tuesday.
UPS Airlines, the airline division of the American courier and package delivery group, was operating a fleet of around 500 cargo planes at the beginning of September, including 27 MD-11s, the aircraft involved in Tuesday’s accident.
The last major air accident in the United States occurred on January 29 near Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, when a military helicopter collided with an airliner about to land, killing 67 people in total.
