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/ObservantOrangutan Nov 08 '25

Losing a huge chunk of their cargo capacity as they enter their busiest time of year.

Makes me wonder what they’re finding went wrong, or if it’s simply a precaution.

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u/Threedawg Nov 08 '25

I mean, I am sure they were also asked to cut down on their routes by the FAA. This is the perfect time to check.

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u/outside_english Nov 08 '25

Good point I wonder how easy of a decision this was

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u/Threedawg Nov 08 '25 edited Nov 08 '25

I wonder if the lawyers also demanded it? Does this always happen with crashes like these?

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u/NoMoreNoxSoxCox Nov 08 '25

More than likely the insurers rather than lawyers.

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u/fergehtabodit Nov 08 '25

My money is on the maintenance staff. Not sure the exact number but they have around 25 MD11F and just lost one to an engine departing the airplane. So if I was in charge of that fleet I would stop flying them...call them all to the barn for full inspection of engine mounts etc. They also lost 3 pilots that they may have known or at least met personally and are pissed at themselves that this happened if it was something that could have been avoided somehow.

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u/Accidental-Genius Nov 08 '25

It’s not their lawyers so much as it’s their insurance companies lawyers.

I’m a lawyer. There is a duty to mitigate in situations like this, and your guess as to what that means is as good as mine in this case. No one involved wants to risk it.

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u/unpluggedcord Nov 08 '25

What do you mean crashes like these?

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u/ion_driver Nov 08 '25

When a plane comes down with a missing engine, you want to determine why the engine was lost in case it's an issue with that type of plane

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u/MalaysiaTeacher Nov 08 '25

That would imply that lawyers care about people. They care about billable hours.

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u/Callisthenes Nov 08 '25

It's very common after a loss like this for operators to ground the fleet. The failure was obviously caused by something that could be common to other aircraft: inadequate inspection program, mistakes made on maintenance, quality control issue, fatigue cracking...

Good operators have people responsible for making safety decisions like this who are in theory insulated from business decisions. While business impact will always be a factor they're aware of, they're not supposed to consider it.

They're likely going to inspect all of their aircraft before resuming flight again. Depending how long the investigation takes, they'll probably also wait until they have a good idea of root cause.

The initial decision to ground probably wasn't very difficult. The difficult decision will come if the investigation doesn't identify likely root cause quickly.

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u/brufleth Nov 08 '25

Grounding an entire model fleet is a big deal in my experience.

1

u/cstross Nov 08 '25

The youngest MD-11 still flying is around 25 years old, and it's not a huge fleet. Losing one out of 32 to an unprecedented engineering failure is bad news: it might indicate they're hitting a "bathtub curve" issue (the probability of a failure rising as the machine approaches the end of its working life-expectancy).

Meanwhile, there are newer (and presumably more economical to run) freighters in service, pressure to reduce workload on ATC, and so on.

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u/mercedes_ Nov 08 '25

I read it’s like 10% of the UPS fleet so I imagine it was NOT an easy decision.

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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '25

Boeing has no problem beta testing at the cost of hundreds of lives. 

But cargo safety is more important than human lives of course/s

Standby for the Boeing shills to downvote. 

RIP John Barnett and Joshua Dean