NTSB Update on UPS Crash Update (Transcript)

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NTSB Update on UPS Crash Update

A new report out today just released by the ntsb hours ago shows boeing the maker of the aircraft was aware of an issue with the part that led to the ups plane crash and they knew about it for more than a decade well the ntsb has just issued an update from that dreadful crash out of Louisville Kentucky of ups flight 2976 last November the question the takeaway from this report is what did Boeing know when did they know it And more specifically, what did they do about it? 

All right, I’m going to unwrap all of that for you as we move forward today. But let’s do a short recap of what happened. 

If you’re not familiar or it’s been a while since you’ve looked at it, UPS-DQ That’s where Boeing comes into all of this. 

Shortly after takeoff, and I mean, they hardly even got airborne, they had already lost their number one engine. That number one engine had come off the wing completely, flown over the top of the number 2 engine, fighting it out and causing it to lose power. And at that point, the flight was kind of doomed. 

They got up to one hundred and eighty four knots altogether. but they couldn’t get enough thrust to get airborne and they crashed. Let’s take a look at that just to refresh our memories. And just a trigger warning, this is hard to watch. 

Right here at that point in the takeoff roll, you can see the big fireball on the left wing. The engine has already departed. It’s already come off and flown up over the top of the wing, and it’s gone over the top of the number 2 engine, coming apart. All those metal fragments like shrapnel coming apart, get sucked into the number 2 engine, causing it to compressor stall and lose power itself. And then They crashed into the buildings off the end of the runway and everybody on board was lost. 11 people on the ground were killed and scores of others were injured. 

It was covered extensively in the news. We covered it here on this channel. But since then, now the NTSB came out with their preliminary investigation. They’ve come out with something that’s kind of unprecedented. 

This is an update.

 It’s not a bulletin. It’s not a preliminary report. 

It’s just an update on what’s going on. And I think there’s kind of an effort to be more transparent over there at the NTSB these days, which is refreshing. That’s really nice to know. And it’s got a bunch of diagrams and so forth in it that are very helpful for us to understand exactly what took place with this MD11. But the big issue, the big question here is Boeing. And what did Boeing know? 

When did they know it? And what did they say about it? And I’ll get to all of that in a minute. So November 4th of 2025 at about 5 14in the afternoon is when they took that fateful takeoff roll and never got really airborne and the airplane crashed. 

They did a preliminary investigation shortly after that, and they zoomed in almost immediately on the aft bearing the aft attachment point, if you will, to the number one engine. Now, both of the wing-mounted engines have a forward and an aft attachment point, and it’s a complicated assembly. 

There’s a great big bolt that goes through it. There’s a thing that’s called a ball element that the bolt goes through. On the outside of the ball element is a thing called a race, and the race goes all the way around the ball element and kind of couples it and holds it there in place. 

There’s a little bit of wiggle room in all of this on purpose it’s designed to be that way if you made it completely rigid every time you hit a bump or turbulence in that airplane it would just jar and it would cause damage to both the engine and the wing so you got to have a little bit of wiggle room in there so there is and that’s by design but when you have that type of wiggle room you also get a little bit of room for friction and friction can lead to Cracking. 

So they’ve got to examine those things on a regular basis. Inspections. Boeing had set up, I think, in every 5year inspection cycle on this, which is a point I’ll get to in a minute. I think that was far too long. I think it should have been shorter than that. But hindsight’s always 2020. Let’s take a look here at the first diagram. And this first diagram is kind of the big picture. If you see the little airplane over here to the left, it shows you the left engine, and it’s got kind of highlighted there the pylon that holds the engine onto the wing. 

Then there’s a blow-up of that pylon down at the bottom of the screen. What I want to focus in on is this thing in the blue box. all right it’s a pylon mount uh bulkhead or aft bulkhead and that round circle right there in the middle right by where that little red dot is that’s where the bolt goes through all right and they don’t have this in the diagram but the bolt goes through there and you can’t really see the wing clevis it holds it on underneath the wing clevis and so forth uh in underneath the pylon so you say you might say Why didn’t they inspect this every flight? 

Isn’t that something that the pilots would look at or maybe the maintenance workers would look at? Well, the problem is all of that is covered up by panels. It’s inside of that pilot. And so it’s just you’d have to unscrew everything and get into it. And there wasn’t a need to inspect it every flight. 

Was there a need to wait 5 years? I don’t think so. I think it should have been inspected more often than that. again, hindsight is 20 20. Right. So that’s where the bolt went through. And this assembly around the outside of this spherical bearing assembly, that’s what’s in question. That race that goes around that ball element is what cracked, and it got fatigued, it cracked, and it came apart in 2 pieces. Now, let’s take a look at the next picture. 

This is the actual ball element, this thing in the middle that I’m discussing with you. You can see a little bit of old grease here at the top and at the bottom, but there’s a groove right in the middle, and that groove in the middle is important to us. 

Because over here, this thing called the bearing race, if you will, has See this little piece right here that’s broken off? This thing on the left side and this thing on the right side at 1 point had been attached. It’s one piece, and it goes around. And this little issue right here that’s broken off, that’s the tongue that fit into this groove. And it all encompassed or housed that ball element inside of it. 

This assembly on the left and this assembly on the right were at 1.1 connected piece. The fracture started right down the middle of it, spherically all the way around. And eventually it broke. And due to the stress of the engine now coming off the wing, it broke enough that the overstress is separated in 2. And then the whole assembly comes apart. When that happens, the bolt is no longer holding the aft attachment point on the wing. 

The engine, which is producing tremendous amount of thrust, then pivots up on its own because it’s trying to fly. It’s trying to fly. It pivots up on its own. It overstresses the forward attachment point. And then the whole thing goes kind of flying through the air up over the back of the airplane, fods out the number 2 engine. 

All right. Now, that thing is very graphic to look at it. I’m going to show you a little bit closer look at now that bearing race and what happened to it. Over on the right hand side, they’ve got it color coded for us. So the orange area is all the fatigue that happened over the years. And you’re going to ask the question, why didn’t they see this? I’ll explain that in a minute. 

The next diagram is going to show you why they didn’t see it. All that fatigue is cracked all the way, almost all the way around. You can see the cracking is all the way to the outside here and all the way to the outside on this side. And it’s on the inside in here. And the yellow is the overstress that happened when it finally let loose and that engine came off. both this side and this side were attached to ether. 

You got to get that part. They were one piece of metal, one hunk of metal at 1 point that went all the way around that ball element. Once that thing let loose, they were doomed. That engine wasn’t going to stay on the airplane anymore. 

Now, I’m going to read something to you here in just a second. But I want to get to this diagram because this is the important diagram. This one, it’s all colored for you. And you can see over here the bolt that goes through this. And you see the dots here, right, the dashed lines? 

That’s that ball element with the bearing race that goes around it. Here is another look at it. schematic view of it there’s the ball element you can see how it looks here remember the the grease here and the grease here this thing this white line right here is that groove that goes down the middle and the blue part is that bearing race that goes all the way around it okay but they’ve they didn’t put it all the way around because they wanted you to see what’s underneath on the diagram now the inspectors were told every 60 months to go take a flashlight, look in here with a scope and see if there was any sort of migration, that’s the word they use for it, or a protrusion of this bearing race right here. This thing is supposed to be out of sight. 

So if you can look through right here and you can look through right here and you don’t see anything, you’re good to go. That thing is in place and it’s intact. 

But if you can’t see all the way through or this thing is sticking out a little bit over here or it’s sticking out a little bit over there, there’s only one reason for that. And that means somewhere inside here, preferably right here or presumably right there, it’s cracked. And now you know you got a fatigue crack in there someplace. 

Now you got to go take the whole thing apart. And Boeing suggested replacing it with a whole new part that didn’t have that tongue and groove assembly in it. 

Now, let me read to you what Boeing said specifically here about this particular issue that they found. All right. Boeing service letter dated on February 7th, 2011 informed operators of 4 previously reported bearing race failures on 3 different airplanes. 

That implies that one airplane had it on both engines on both sides. So there were 3 different airplanes where they looked and they saw this little assembly right here protruding and they knew that it was a problem. so they opened it up and sure enough the spherical bearing assemblies had gone bad. 

Specifically, each failure had initiated at the design recess groove on the interior surface of the bearing race, that little groove that i showed you on the previous picture over here, that little groove right there and this little tongue that went in it. that’s where the fatiguing took place. this is, in my opinion, a design flaw. 

you don’t need the tongue and groove here, it’s just something they designed it with. but with that tongue inside that groove it creates a friction motion that can lead to the fatigue and the cracking. if that wasn’t there, they wouldn’t have that little pulling moment. every time there was an adjustment in the engine and over time it just created a crack in the metal. 

If they had gotten rid of that altogether, which they did in the new redesign, which they came short of saying here later on- that you had to replace every bearing on every airplane, they said: if you see it and you want to go ahead and replace it, 

They left it up to the owners- UPS, FedEx and the others- to make that decision on their own. And that’s the delicate ballet that goes on between an aircraft manufacturer and the aircraft owner. It’s kind of like your car and my car right. 

You get maybe a 3year 36 thousand mile warranty or a hundred thousand on. you know the major parts of your car and after that you’re kind of on your own and the manufacturer will come out with some ideas and some suggestions. but it would be on you to go out and get it done. and so there is a there’s some tension here between the culpability of ups and the culpability of boeing on all this. and remember, boeing didn’t design this airplane. this was a mcdonald douglas airplane, so boeing inherited it. but guess what, Once you buy the company and you buy the airplane, you buy the liability and the responsibility for it. 

So, having said that, they did come out in 2011 with a bulletin. that said, take a look at this. They knew about it, They pointed it out, but they came short of saying: replace it all, And in hindsight I think that would have been most wise for them to have replaced all of these, especially given the 19, 70, 9 crash of the DC ten that has something very similar to this. go wrong with it. 

I think it would have been very prudent on their part to go all the way with this thing and make sure that that they fixed it and they fixed it right. But again, you know, sadly, many times it’s tragic in this industry, 

The loss of life is the thing that leads to getting something done. I have said before I don’t think you’re going to see the MD11 come back. I think UPS and the few others that are flying the MD11 are looking for an excuse, probably to park that airplane permanently and replace it with newer airplanes. 

I think if I was on a board of directors I’d probably be making that type of decision. But to recap what happened here back in November, 4th of 2025 at about 5 14in the afternoon. 

UPS flight. 29, 76 never got airborne. 25 feet off the ground was all the farther they got when the number one engine came off due to a failure of the bearing race that goes around the ball element that holds the main bolt and that holds the whole aft assembly of the attachment points of the number one engine. 

Once that came loose it overstressed itself. It overstressed the forward attachment point. The whole thing flew up over the top of the airplane, fotted out the number 2 engine. 

You can fly these airplanes on 2 engines. They’ll get airborne at any gross weight, but you can’t get airborne on just one engine. 

Simply not enough thrust. i think the pilots on this flight were heroic. they tried everything they could. our thoughts and our prayers absolutely go out to them, the families on the ground, the innocent folks on the ground, the many that were injured from this and folks 

i want to say before we get done with this video, we i do a lot of reporting on a lot of different incidents and it’s an absolute pleasure to talk about things that went wrong, but nobody got hurt. i think that’s very informative and very educational. it breaks my heart as as much as is it possible to ever cover a story where there’s a loss of life. those are real people with real families, with real lives, and let’s not lose sight of that here. my buddy gary down in florida kind of reminded me about that recently. he was friends with christina biffle and if you followed the any of the coverage of the biffle crash, there were real people in that airplane that had real families and friends, 

And Gary was a friend of theirs, And so he did a very poignant video. Check out his video on his channel at Gary Pilot and watch that one, because it really tugged at your heartstrings. 

He did a really nice job with that And we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that there’s real people involved in all of this. But this is the latest update from the NTSB. They are pointing a finger at Boeing. You know blaming Boeing,

 I don’t know. I would come short of that.

 I would say Boeing knew, Boeing pointed it out And then, in hindsight, they should have gone the further step of saying that somebody should have replaced or the manufacturer, the owners should have replaced all of the these assemblies on the airplanes. 

They did not. But now again, having looked at this and the tragic accident that took place, they probably should have. Well, now you know I’m Captain Steve Fly safe.