NTSB: Engine Fell Off Before Louisville Crash

Federal investigators looking into the deadly UPS cargo plane crash Kentucky will closely examine the aircraft's maintenance records and engines after finding that one of its engines fell off during takeoff. The plane crashed and burst into flames Tuesday in Louisville, creating an inferno that consumed the enormous aircraft and spread to nearby businesses.

• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced Wednesday that the death toll has risen to 11, including a young child, the Louisville Courier Journal reports. "I expect it to rise to 12, possibly, by the end of the day, and there are a handful of other people that we're still searching for and we hope weren't on site," he said.

• There was a fire in the plane's left wing, and the engine "detached" during takeoff, said Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation. "There are a lot of different parts of this airplane in a lot of different places," Inman said, describing a debris field that stretched for a half-mile.
• The NTSB will look into the full maintenance history of the UPS plane as well as the engines and other components, Inman said. But he said UPS has told the agency that the flight was not delayed and that no maintenance was performed right before it took off, the AP reports.
• Flight records suggest the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, built in 1991, underwent maintenance while it was on the ground in San Antonio for more than a month until mid-October. It's not clear what work was done.

• Jeff Guzzetti, a former federal crash investigator, said it's too early to know whether the problem at the time of the crash was in the engine, the structure that holds the engine, or something else. "It could have been the engine partially coming off and ripping out fuel lines. Or it could have been a fuel leak igniting and then burning the engine off. It's just too soon to tell," he said.
• Photos showed one of the plane's engines sitting on the ground next to the runway after the crash, said John Cox, CEO of Florida-based aviation consulting firm Safety Operating Systems. Cox said he could recall another instance when one of the same General Electric engines detached from a plane. That happened at Chicago's O'Hare airport in 1979, when 273 people were killed. Investigators blamed improper maintenance before the crash.
• Beshear, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, and US Rep. Morgan McGarvey toured the debris field Wednesday. "What we just saw ... was like a scene out of a Terminator movie," McGarvey said, per the Courier Journal. "It is burned and mangled wreckage beyond anything I have ever seen," he said. "The smells, the sights—these are things that are not going to escape us when we close our eyes tonight."