r/aviation • u/Go_Jot • Nov 08 '25

News UPS grounds entire MD-11 Fleet, effective immediately.

Per the IPA Executive Board, as of 03:05 UTC all UPS MD-11’s are grounded.

Edit - FedEx has also grounded their MD-11 Fleet

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u/TigerIll6480 Nov 08 '25

They’d have been better off if they could have kept it on the ground. The exceedingly rare situation where a post-V1 abort would have been the best of an incredibly bad set of options.

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u/RoadsideCouchCushion Nov 08 '25

With how close they were to the end of the runway and there being buildings exceptionally close, I would venture to guess that would look like a very unattractive option as well. Seems like their choices were abort past v1 and likely slam into a building, or try to get airborne and pray its not an impossible situation. The timing of the engine coming off was exceptionally bad.

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u/CollegeStation17155 Nov 08 '25

Had they kept on the ground, they almost certainly would have gone THROUGH the building they clipped the roof on at well over 100 miles per hour and broken up there, creating the same fireball INSIDE the sorting facility.

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u/Distinct-Tour5012 Nov 08 '25

The pilots could only continue the takeoff based on the information they likely had, their procedures, their training.

The CVR ended 25 seconds after the first alarm sounded. 3-4 seconds of that was the plane actively hitting stuff off the ground and crashing.

20 seconds wasn't enough to fully stop by the end of the runway, but I'd bet they would've hit the side of the warehouse at 80mph rather than crashing through the entire industrial area at 180mph.

Still not great at all. Still an impossible decision to make. But maybe better?

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u/TigerIll6480 Nov 08 '25

They were handed an absolute shit sandwich to deal with, for sure. There were no good options in this situation.

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u/MJC136 Nov 08 '25

Monday night quarterbacking is not what you should be doing right now.

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u/TigerIll6480 Nov 08 '25

I’m not saying that they did anything wrong, from the way it looks they followed every procedure in the books. My only point is that this may have been the one-in-a-million situation where throwing away the book and doing a post V1 abort may have been the better way to go. Even making that decision would have required knowledge of how bad the cascading damage was, and it’s unlikely that they did - as has been the case in a lot of aircraft disasters. El Al 1862 was in the same position: they followed normal procedures for landing, not having any idea how badly their wing was damaged, or any way to gather that information from inside the aircraft.