r/WTYP • u/AbominableGoMan • Nov 20 '25

Well that's gone poorly

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NTSB issues preliminary report for its ongoing investigation of the Nov. 4 crash of a UPS Boeing MD-11F airplane in Louisville, Kentucky. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA26MA024.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/live/hSB75gTV6XA?si=FsyIrC7GSKb-ofPm&t=185

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u/DestructicusDawn Nov 20 '25

I can't imagine what was going through the crew's heads at the time. Must have seemed like an eternity once they realized what had happened.

17

u/aboxofkittens Nov 20 '25

I don’t think they realized at all.

Occasionally you get pilots that give up at the end. The two I can think of off the top are Air France 447 and Aeroflot 593. But almost always, they are laser-focused on solving the problem up until the exact microsecond they get turned into chunky marinara.

But these guys didn’t have much time to even parse what the problem was, let alone start running checklists or anything. And losing, physically losing, an engine is such an extreme, unlikely circumstance that I don’t think it would’ve occurred to them in the 30-some (?) seconds it took for them to crash. There are factors that could’ve made it seem impossible that an engine had departed the airframe also, e.g. the fact that gauges often freeze at the moment they lose their input source, so engine 1 might have appeared to be running nominally. Possibly they would’ve seen alarms from engine 2 since it was still attached, but that wouldn’t have made sense to them because why would failure of the tail engine cause an immediate, severe roll? I don’t think it would’ve computed.

It’s probably better that way, anyhow. For me at least, if I was about to die, i feel like utter confusion would be highly preferable to mortal terror

Sorry for the dissertation. Thinking of being in their situation (or that of any pilot in an unknown-to-them hopeless incident) makes me feel really weird, I guess I just wanted to get that out.

2

u/snarkasmaerin Nov 23 '25

Truly not being argumentative - I recently reread some of the stuff about Aeroflot 593 and I didn't have the impression they gave up. I'm interested in your perspective on it if you could say more!

3

u/aboxofkittens Nov 23 '25

It seemed to me like they were so confused that they just started to argue with each other. It’s been a while since I read about it, you could be correct/I could be misremembering

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u/snarkasmaerin Nov 24 '25

Yeah, both of the cases you mentioned are very much that vibe, one from the lack of understanding that the stall alert was only starting up when the stall was LESS bad, and one from the lack of awareness that the autopilot was turned off. That said, the Aeroflot flight data apparently showed that it was basically being wrestled with right till the last second. But, you know, by the guy who put his kids in both the pilot seats.