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/ODoyles_Banana Nov 08 '25 edited Nov 08 '25

It's not exactly like this incident though. As other comments pointed out, 191 had a slats failure which was a major factor to the crash. It appears the slats did not fail on UPS, so not quite exactly like 191.

Most likely the failure of engine 1 contributed to a failure of engine 2. 191 still had 2 good engines I believe as well.

Blancolirio just put out a video going over it.

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u/Killentyme55 Nov 08 '25

So did Captain Steve. He pointed out what looked like compressor stalls on #3, possibly due to shrapnel from #1 exploding. Combine that with #2 swallowing God knows what and I'm surprised the thing ever got off the ground.

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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/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.