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[return to "UPS plane crashes near Louisville airport"]
1. haunte+t[view] [source] 2025-11-04 23:14:16
>>jnsaff+(OP)
Video of the crash, left (?) engine was already engulfed in flames while taking off

https://x.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

https://xcancel.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

Edit: just the mp4 https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1985845862409334784/pu/...

There is an incredible amount of ground damage! Just wow, this is very bad https://files.catbox.moe/3303ob.jpg

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2. justsi+o2[view] [source] 2025-11-04 23:29:01
>>haunte+t
The damage on the ground is scary to look at. I think the only silver lining here is that it was "just" a sparser industrial area and there weren't any homes. I'm really curious about what the investigation will reveal in a few months. This doesn't look like a "regular" engine fire from a bird strike or so, you would normally expect the flames to come out the back and not over the wing. And at least in theory the MD-11 should be flyable with just two engines, although flames on a wing is probably "really really bad" just by itself already. Too early to speculate about what happened though.
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3. JCM9+Z61[view] [source] 2025-11-05 09:57:00
>>justsi+o2
Zoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people, precisely to limit casualties during an event like this. Industrial would be permitted while residential and commercial use is not.

Scarily there are communities that have ignored such logic and permitted dense residential development right next to an airport.

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4. potato+3p1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 12:57:29
>>JCM9+Z61
You can always come up with some pretext to justify things by ignoring the other side of the equation.

How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?

IDK how the math pencils out, but an attempt ought to be made before drawing conclusions.

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5. Retric+PD1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 14:34:28
>>potato+3p1
None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing. The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water often by building airports on reclaimed land.

What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.

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6. gwbas1+KF1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 14:46:58
>>Retric+PD1
> The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water.

That works in costal areas, but not inland.

There's no large body of water near the Louisville airport.

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7. Retric+zI1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 15:01:16
>>gwbas1+KF1
The Ohio River is a large body of water fairly close if someone was going to relocate Louisville airport.
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8. WorldM+n82[view] [source] 2025-11-05 17:04:04
>>Retric+zI1
The Ohio River is a mile wide at Louisville, but that still doesn't wide enough to classify it "large body of water", especially because it is a river that moves relatively quick for its width and then hits falls/rapids just downstream of Louisville.

But also there's a lot of urban and suburban development you'd have to displace to even consider moving the airport near the Ohio River for most miles both up and down stream of Louisville.

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9. Retric+wo2[view] [source] 2025-11-05 18:31:11
>>WorldM+n82
Tradeoffs. Physical land under the airport is lost either way, but land near the old airport becomes more useful where the river itself couldn’t have buildings in either situation. Thus moving it near a river or other large body of water is a long term net gain.

As to a crash, ditching into an industrial area isn’t significantly worse for the passengers than ditching into a set of rapids, but the rapids are far better for the general public.

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10. WorldM+Fz2[view] [source] 2025-11-05 19:32:15
>>Retric+wo2
To be fair to this specific airport, the industrial area South of the airport is almost entirely UPS Airlines facilities. The safety hazard posed by the UPS Airlines flight crash was primarily to UPS Airlines warehouses and warehouse workers. They made their own tradeoffs in this case of what they placed close to their own runways (including apparently they had a fuel recycling plant not far from the crash line that made firefighting more complicated). Sure it's still very different from a large body of water, but it's also certainly not like the land was entirely a general usage industrial area either.

Had the crash happened in a different direction there might be other complaints, sure, but even airports with large bodies of water neighboring them only generally neighbor a side or two.

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