UPS distribution hub in Louisville has 300 flights per day. What to know

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A UPS cargo plane crashed Tuesday at a Louisville, Kentucky airport where the company operates its largest package delivery hub.

UPS calls the giant center Worldport.

Here’s what to know about its enormous scale:

Processes 2 million packages per day

The facility at Muhammad Ali International Airport employs some 20,000 people, making UPS the largest employer in the Louisville area, the company said on its website.

It processes 2 million packages per day in a facility the size of 10 football fields. It has the ability to handle even more: It has the capacity for 416,000 packages and documents per hour.

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.

Expansion plans

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.

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.

Hundreds of flights per day

More than 300 flights take off and land from the facility each day, the company said on its website.

The center has room for 125 aircraft to park.

UPS flies six different types of planes in the U.S.

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.

UPS gets permission to fly its own planes in 1988

UPS got its start in Seattle in 1907, when two teenagers started American Messenger Co. The name United Parcel Service debuted in 1919.

The company won Federal Aviation Administration approval to operate its own aircraft in 1988.

Headquartered in Atlanta, UPS today employs about 490,000 people worldwide.