UPS plane underwent weeks of maintenance one month before deadly crash

The UPS cargo plane that crashed Nov. 4 in Louisville appears to have undergone heavy maintenance during a six-week period in September and October, based on flight records and remarks from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The plane stopped in San Antonio from Sept. 3 to Oct. 18, where ST Engineering operates a facility providing "exclusive heavy maintenance" to UPS MD-11 planes like the one involved in the recent crash, according to the firm.

The NTSB is in the process of gathering maintenance records for the plane, and is aware of recent maintenance work in San Antonio, board member Todd Inman told reporters Nov. 6. The agency's investigation will involve analysis of the plane's maintenance records up to the point of the crash.

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At least five maintenance issues on the plane were reported this year to the Federal Aviation Administration's Service Difficulty Reporting System, records show, including three in the last two months, while the plane was on the ground in San Antonio. The plane that crashed in Louisville did not have a large number of reports this year, relative to other planes in the UPS fleet, according to a Courier Journal analysis of FAA data.

Air operators are required by the FAA to file a Service Difficulty Report whenever any one of 17 events occur. The events outlined by the FAA range from a false fire warning during a flight to engines shutting down during flights, unwanted landing gear extension or retraction, issues that require major repairs and "cracks, permanent deformation, or corrosion of aircraft structures, if more than the maximum acceptable to the manufacturer or the FAA."

These filings alone do not present a complete picture of an aircraft's state of repair.

Ladd Sanger, a Dallas-based aviation attorney, has worked on crash litigation in the past. Provided with one of the crashed plane's recent Service Difficulty Reports by The Courier Journal, Sanger said the problem described a cracked structural element.

The "difficulty date" on the report is listed as Sept. 9, when the plane was on the ground in San Antonio.

While serious, he said the issue could be repaired. The description in the report also noted a requirement for "permanent repair per EO," which Sanger said refers to an engineering order. Two other Service Difficulty Reports filed for the plane during the time it was in San Antonio involved corrosion on structural components.

"It's going to be a laborious process to go through everything," Inman said of the maintenance records from San Antonio and elsewhere, "especially whenever you're talking about six weeks of being there."

Sanger said aircraft taken to the San Antonio facility undergo "major repairs and inspections." In order to identify the repairs described in the crashed plane's reports, mechanics would normally need to take much of the plane apart, he said.

The process of doing heavy checks is intensive and invasive, according to Sanger.

"They disassemble the airplane. They take the entire interior out of it. They take all the panels off of it. And they go in and do non-destructive metallurgical testing on it. They inspect all of the different systems," he said.

Such inspections are typically required after a set period of time or flight hours, he added, noting the length of the crashed plane's stay in San Antonio did not appear atypical.

ST Engineering, the firm operating the San Antonio facility, confirmed to The Courier Journal that UPS is one of its customers and that it provides "airframe maintenance" for the shipping company's MD-11 planes.

"We are not able to comment further at this point in time as investigations are ongoing. We will cooperate fully when the relevant authorities reach out to us," ST Engineering said in a statement, adding, "Our thoughts are with those who have been impacted, especially the bereaved families."

The plane flew more than two dozen flights between its downtime in San Antonio and its disastrous Nov. 4 crash, according to records from Flightradar24. Records also indicate the plane stopped for multiple days last month in Ontario, California, where UPS operates another shipping hub.

The MD-11 freighter that crashed Nov. 4 was more than 30 years old and part of an aging fleet that UPS and FedEx were working to phase out in favor of newer, more efficient aircraft, The

Inman said UPS has been "very cooperative" in the NTSB's investigation of the crash, including in providing necessary records.

The cause of the Nov. 4 crash is unclear, and it could take a year or more for the NTSB to release the complete findings of its investigation. In addition to analyzing the debris field and other evidence in Louisville, the agency said the plane's flight data recorder and voice recorder were recovered, and experts are analyzing the contents.

"We will do everything we need to, to find out what happened," Inman said, "and to figure out how to keep it from happening again."

This article was published by Courier Journal