After Deadly Plane Crash at UPS Hub in Louisville, Some Deliveries May Be Delayed

Europe|Deadly Louisville Air Crash Disrupts One of World’s Busiest Cargo Hubs

The UPS air cargo headquarters in Louisville, Ky., where a plane crash on Tuesday killed at least nine people, is one of the world’s biggest automated package sorting facilities and the hub of the shipping company’s global air network.

The site, known as UPS Worldport, covers 5.2 million square feet at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. Every day, it handles more than 300 flights and processes about two million packages for the health care, tech and retail industries, according to UPS, which is based in Atlanta. More than 400,000 packages are sorted each hour.

UPS said late Tuesday that it had halted package sorting operations at Worldport, and that the crash, which ignited a large fire in a cluster of buildings near the airport, could cause delays for airborne and international deliveries. “Contingency plans are in place to help ensure that shipments arrive at their final destinations as quickly as conditions permit,” UPS said.

In an update on Wednesday morning, UPS said that sorting for its Second Day Air shipping service at Worldport had been canceled for the day.

Jon Katz, the founder of Blendi, which sells portable blenders, said he was experiencing some delays in shipments that were supposed to go out on Wednesday and Thursday.

“We are working with UPS to reroute things where possible,” he said.

The Louisville airport, shut after the incident, reopened to passenger air traffic on Wednesday morning, though officials said that “delays and cancellations are likely following yesterday’s incident.”

Last year, more than 6.9 billion pounds of cargo took off from and landed at the Louisville airport, ranking it the third-busiest cargo airport in North America and fifth busiest in the world, according to Airports Council International World. From Louisville, 95 percent of people in the United States can be reached in four hours by plane, according to UPS.

The shipping company’s Louisville campus performs services including product testing and repair, critical parts deployment and product configuration, and more than 150 UPS customers have inventory there, the company says.