UPS plane engine fell off during crash in Louisville, NTSB official says - CBS News

Updated on: November 6, 2025 / 6:00 PM EST / CBS/AP

A UPS cargo plane's left wing caught fire and an engine fell off just before it crashed and exploded after takeoff from Louisville International Airport in Kentucky, a federal investigator said Wednesday, offering the first official details about a disaster that killed at least 13 people.  

There was a fire in the plane's left wing and the engine "detached" during takeoff on Tuesday, said Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation. 

"There are a lot of different parts of this airplane in a lot of different places," Inman said during a news conference, describing a debris field that stretched for a half-mile.

The plane with three people on board crashed about 5:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday as it was departing for Honolulu from UPS Worldport at Louisville International. Video showed flames on the plane's left wing and a trail of smoke. 

"The plane lifted off and gained enough altitude to clear the fence at the end of Runway 17R. Shortly after clearing that fence, it made impact with structures and the terrain off of the airport property," Inman said.

Inman said the plane's black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — were recovered by NTSB investigators on Wednesday afternoon. 

He said the black box "suffered some heat around it, not intrusion," but added that "the recorders are built for that."  

"We feel comfortable, once we get these to our lab in D.C., that we will be able to get a good readout of the applicable data," Inman said. "And that will be yet another point of information that will really help us understand what happened during this point of flight."

Inman said the crashed plane was a 1991 McDonnell Douglas 2 that was "altered" into a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 Freighter. He disclosed that the plane was currently being "handled" by aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing, which merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.