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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A UPS cargo plane crashed Tuesday at a Louisville, Kentucky airport where the company operates its largest package delivery hub.
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UPS calls the giant center Worldport.
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Here’s what to know about its enormous scale:
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Processes 2 million packages per day
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The facility at Muhammad Ali International Airport sprawls across the equivalent of 90 football fields.
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It processes 2 million packages per day in a facility. It has the ability to handle even more: It has the capacity for 416,000 packages and documents per hour.
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A time-lapse video UPS posted on YouTube shows planes taxiing to and from special cargo gates. Workers unload containers packed with cardboard boxes. Other employees load the boxes onto a conveyor belt, which delivers packages to workers who load them into other containers.
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A UPS town
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Some 20,000 people work at the center, making UPS the largest employer in the Louisville area, the company said on its website.
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Louisville Metro Council member Betsy Ruhe said everyone in town knows someone who works at UPS.
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“My heart goes out to everybody at UPS because this is a UPS town,” Ruhe said. “My cousin’s a UPS pilot. My aide’s tennis partner is a UPS pilot. The intern in my office works overnight at UPS to pay for college.”
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Hundreds of flights per day
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More than 300 flights take off and land from the facility each day, the company said on its website.
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The center has room for 125 aircraft to park.
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Louisville’s location in Kentucky puts it within four hours of flight time to 95% of the U.S. population. It serves 200 countries around the world.
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UPS flies six different types of planes in the U.S.
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It has 27 MD-11s, which is the model that crashed on Tuesday. It also flies the A300-600, which is an Airbus, and four different types of Boeing jets: 757-200, 767-300, 747-400 and 747-8.
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Expansion plans
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In 2022, the company said it would begin building a new aircraft hangar in Louisville that would be large enough to park two 747 planes, which are the largest in its fleet, and eight new flight simulators.
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UPS Healthcare, which provides shipments for clinical trials and shipments to medical care patients and other services was due to get two new buildings in the expansion.
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UPS gets permission to fly its own planes in 1988
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UPS got its start in Seattle in 1907, when two teenagers started American Messenger Co. The name United Parcel Service debuted in 1919.
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The company won Federal Aviation Administration approval to operate its own aircraft in 1988.
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Headquartered in Atlanta, UPS today employs about 490,000 people worldwide.
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This version of the story corrects the size of the facility to say it’s the equivalent of 90 football fields instead of 10.
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English (US)