Day: November 7, 2025

Dozens of flights were canceled, and passengers were forced to spend the night or find alternate means of travel.

The airport opened to traffic again on Wednesday.

A screenshot of a social media video posted by Reuters showed the UPS plane banking hard to the left as it crashed and was engulfed in fire and smoke.

Photos posted online show the engine landed next to the runway.

The plane crashed about three miles south of the airport in an industrial area with businesses and warehouses.

The runway it departed from, Runway 17R, is just off the bottom left of this image.

Some businesses hit include Kentucky Petroleum Recycling and Grade A Auto Parts.

It left a 295-foot (90-meter) gash in the warehouse roof, Vantor said.

Data from Flightradar24 suggests Flight 2976 only reached a maximum altitude of around 175 feet.

Officials say there are still at least nine people unaccounted for, as of Thursday afternoon.

The city initially issued a shelter-in-place notice for a five-mile radius around the airport. That extended to anything north of the airport to the Ohio River as emergency responders worked to contain the fire.

The order has since been reduced to a small radius around the hazardous area of the crash site.

NTSB official J. Todd Inman said on Wednesday that CCTV footage shows “the left engine detaching from the wing during the takeoff roll.” Takeoff roll is the runway distance from start to liftoff.

Mark Stephens, a former MD-11 pilot and instructor at Delta Air Lines, told Business Insider that it’s rare, but the engine is designed to shear off an aircraft during intense vibration.

This prevents the engine from hitting the wing, fuselage, or other critical components. The MD-11 has three engines, including one below its vertical stabilizer. Stephens said the MD-11 can fly with just two engines.