What could help – and hurt – the investigation into the Louisville UPS plane crash

  A team of investigators arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, Wednesday to look into what led to the fiery crash of a UPS cargo plane shortly after it took off from the Louisville airport Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and destroying businesses and other structures in the area.

Officials have warned the death count may rise as the investigation continues.

More than two dozen officials with the National Transportation and Safety Board traveled to the mangled remnants at the crash site near Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport Wednesday, where they recovered the plane’s black boxes, which could hold crucial information about what led to the disaster.

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“It’s suffered some heat, not intrusion, but heat around it. These recorders are built for that,” NTSB Member Todd Inman said Wednesday.

The agency will know more about what the black boxes contain once they are transported back to Washington, DC, Inman said.

Black boxes can survive a fire – but not always, said Mary Schiavo, CNN aviation analyst and former US Department of Transportation inspector general.

“On the 4 planes of September 11, 2001 (all loaded with fuel), only 3 of the 8 black boxes survived the explosions and fire,” she noted in an email to CNN, referring to the 9/11 terror attacks.

In the wake of Tuesday’s tragedy, family members of the crash victims will be waiting for the answers investigators are working to uncover, Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney with law firm Motley Rice and former US Air Force navigator, told CNN.

The NTSB will release a preliminary report within 30 days, but it could be 18 to 24 months before the investigation concludes, he said.

“The one thing that all these family members, based on my experience, want to know is how this could have happened?” Brauchle said. “It’s not something that happens every day, but I see it a lot. It’s more than grief.”

As teams on the ground work to understand what caused the crash, here are some factors aviation experts say could impact the investigation.

The crash left a half-mile-long debris field, and the first priority is dealing with rescue and recovery, Schiavo said.

The debris field is large, though certainly not the largest the NTSB or similar agencies in other nations have encountered, she said.

“Crash investigators have scoured miles of Scottish countryside (PanAm flight 103), miles of ocean floor (TWA flight 800), and the southern Indian Ocean (Malaysia Airlines flight 370),” she said, referencing previous plane crashes. “They carefully map where pieces are recovered. There are great software programs that help you do this as you work a debris field.”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who ordered flags lowered to half-staff Wednesday in honor of the crash victims, urged residents to stay away from the area of the site for their own safety.

“Louisville looked apocalyptic last night,” US Rep. Morgan McGarvey said at a news conference Wednesday. “The images of smoke coming over our city, of debris falling in every neighborhood, people trapped in their homes.”

“I had someone tell me it looked like it was raining oil in Louisville,” he added.

Though the plane was not carrying any hazardous cargo that would “create an environmental issue,” Beshear said, officials monitored Louisville’s air quality in the wake of the crash, according to the mayor.

Biohazards and chemical contamination are always present at the site of crashes, Schiavo said.

“When I work with crash debris, even months or years later, I wear hazmat gear,” she said.

The left engine of the plane detached during takeoff, Inman said Wednesday, citing airport surveillance footage viewed by the agency.

“Both the condition of the engine and the location of the engine will be of paramount importance to the NTSB,” Schiavo said. “The most recent maintenance will give a pretty good idea of the health of the engines.”

It’s possible that pieces flying off of one failing engine could have impacted other key parts of the plane, and the engine likely ruptured the wing fuel tank when it ripped from the plane, she said.

While an image of what appears to be much of the left engine has been circulating, parts of the engine will likely still need to be found, CNN safety analyst David Soucie said Wednesday.

“If this engine did indeed come off prematurely, as it appears it did, then you’re going to be looking for the engine mounts. You’re going to be looking at the bolts themselves. All of those pieces need to be recovered and brought back in,” Soucie said.

The NTSB is asking people to report any debris found in surrounding areas, which could help provide investigators with some of the answers they’re searching for.
Recent plane maintenance

NTSB investigators always look at three things when dealing with a crash: “They look into the environment. They look into the pilots. They look at the airplane,” CNN correspondent Pete Muntean, who is also a pilot and flight instructor, said Wednesday.

Since the weather was pretty fair at the time of the crash and the NTSB had few initial takeaways about the environment, the airplane itself will be key, Muntean said.

“The maintenance will be the big issue — what exactly was done to the aircraft, who did it, what parts were replaced, what procedures were followed, and who inspected the work,” Schiavo said.

Investigators likely requested all maintenance and overhaul records for the plane before arriving, she said. The team will be particularly interested in any maintenance checks, in which engines or other parts may have been removed or replaced, she said.

It’s too soon to know for sure whether any maintenance issues impacted the crash, Muntean stressed on Wednesday. Some of the initial videos and images from the crash are revealing, though, Schiavo said.

“The most telling photo is the one where the engine is separated from the rest of the wreckage, showing it separated from the plane before the final crash and explosion. This reveals the pilots were left with no ability to control this plane,” she said. “The fire on takeoff shows that something was wrong right from the start.”

The plane was not delayed, and no maintenance work was done immediately before the crash Tuesday, according to UPS, Inman said. NTSB investigators will independently verify that and “will be going back and looking at every aspect of maintenance that was done on this plane,” he added. 

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