Investigation underway: A UPS cargo plane crashed shortly after taking off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport Tuesday, leaving a fiery trail of destruction and a half- mile-long debris field. At least 12 people have died and others are injured, officials say, warning the death toll could climb as the investigation continues.
Black boxes recovered: An NTSB investigation team is on site at the crash location and has recovered the aircraft’s “black boxes” - the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder.
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/ups-plane-crash-louisville-airport?ch=1
Not anymore. This was an old tri-jet. Once engines became reliable enough to increase ETOPS ratings (the time a plane can fly with an engine out) from 60 to now 240 minutes, and you could fly a 2-engine jet across the ocean on the same route as a four- or three-engine jet, it didn’t make sense to keep buying those with higher engine counts and the accompanying fuel usage required.
In turn, those older planes like the 747, DC-10, and MD-11, are generally turned into cargo aircraft for the remainder of their service life. They still have all the same airworthiness requirements needed to fly in US and other countries’ airspace.
This jet should have been able to take off with two of its three engines just fine, but I heard a rumor that the middle engine suffered a compressor stall and wasn’t running at full power. From the video it looks like the nose is up but the plane is descending due to lack of power. Even if the engine stall isn’t true, if the engine comes off the wing, as what seems to be the case here, it can critically damage the wing itself and stall it. See American Airlines 191 disaster in Chicago, for example.