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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. Araina+sH1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 14:56:02
>>Retric+PD1
>None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_International_Airport

It's hard to project growth. Things build right up to the limit of the airport for convenient access, then the area grows and the airport needs to grow - and what do you do? Seattle-Tacoma is critically undersized for the traffic it gets and has been struggling with the fact that there's physically nowhere to expand to.

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7. Retric+CJ1[view] [source] 2025-11-05 15:07:48
>>Araina+sH1
Zoning is one option to direct growth, but you can move airports. Chicago is right next to a Great Lake and there’s relatively shallow areas ready to be reclaimed etc.

Obviously you’re better off making such decisions early rather than building a huge airport only to abandon it. Thus it’s called urban planning not urban triage.

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8. Araina+7M2[view] [source] 2025-11-05 20:37:49
>>Retric+CJ1
Move them to where? Cities large enough to merit an airport generally either have development which has expanded around them or physical features not conducive to development (mountains, lakes, etc.).

It's easy to say "just build bigger elsewhere" but unless you go dozens of miles out and add hours to every trip to/from the airport there's no options.

And no, "just fill in every body of water" is not an option. It doesn't work at all in many cases, is hilariously expensive in all cases, and has enormous environmental impact.

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9. Retric+Zj3[view] [source] 2025-11-05 23:59:29
>>Araina+7M2
I’m specifically suggesting using reclaimed land if they relocated the airport because the cost seems to work out for Chicago, though obviously an in depth analysis is necessary. Still just looking at the depths combined with lakes not having the downsides of open oceans makes it promising. Unfortunately we’re talking about a huge airport so moving anywhere gets incredibly expensive.

The ultimate reason so many cities use land reclamation for airports is open water does not lose property value by being near the airport. Thus a given greater metropolitan area regains not just the physical land of the airport but the increased property value from all that land that’s no longer next to an airport.

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