True, but rather doubtful. UPS has owned that part of the airport for longer than I've been alive. As a kid, yeah sometimes a plane comes over but nobody really seemed to care.

Fast fwd 15 years and now the city is telling us how unsafe it is to live there, passing out studies about how airplane noise will ruin your life, etc. And they made the buyout 'optional', knowing they'd railroad the holdouts, which they did. They'd tear down every house and the road leading to your house as they went, until the holdouts gave in.

All of a sudden my neighborhood is gone. And that awful, noisy, unsafe to live in place...is full of workers in cheap steel warehouses. I guess it's more safe for them.

Many people may not realize, but UPS and Ford absolutely own Louisville. If either says jump, the city government will ask how high?

MDW immediately came to mind as an airport closely surrounded by neighborhoods. I've always wondered what it's like to live in one of those neighborhoods. Is it a perpetual nuisance or do you get used to it?

San Jose does. You can, in theory, walk to downtown from the airport; it's about an hour and a half via pedestrian trail:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/zhZdA5tWGAKunM2e8

(This is widely considered a misfeature of San Jose - it limits the height of buildings in downtown San Jose to 10 stories because the downtown is directly under the flight path of arriving flights, it limits runway length and airport expansion, and it means that planes and their noise fly directly over key tourist attractions like the Rose Garden and Convention Center. If we ever had a major plane crash like this one in San Jose it would be a disaster, because the airport is bounded by 101 on the north, 880 on the south, the arriving flight path goes right over downtown, and the departing flight path goes right over Levi's Stadium, Great America, and several office buildings.)

>None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_International_Airport

It's hard to project growth. Things build right up to the limit of the airport for convenient access, then the area grows and the airport needs to grow - and what do you do? Seattle-Tacoma is critically undersized for the traffic it gets and has been struggling with the fact that there's physically nowhere to expand to.

In all honesty most countries in europe have at least one airport in a city centre. I mean look at lisbon, RKV, BHD/LCY (even glasgow,LHR to some extent), BMA, NCE.

> Nobody puts airports inside city centers

Taipei Songshan, Boston Logan and the old Hong Kong Kai Tak to name a few.

> The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water.

That works in costal areas, but not inland.

There's no large body of water near the Louisville airport.

> Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing

Ever see Dallas Love Field?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/A94EdexYwfpyeMxa7

Lots of airports are pretty much immediately adjacent to their city centers.

It also has JFK, on the South side.

Well, there's a very big difference between "Engine fire: some of the combustion chamber's heat and flame has breached containment" and, say, "Engine fire: the engine has exploded, catastrophically damaging your wing which is now visibly on fire". However, both things are reported in the cockpit as ENG FIRE.

There's also a very big difference between "Engine failure: something has damaged or jammed enough components that the turbines are no longer spinning fast enough to produce thrust or drive the generators" and "Engine failure: the engine is no longer attached to the aircraft, which is why it is no longer producing thrust". However, both things are reported in the cockpit as ENG FAIL.

(Un)fortunately, cockpit warnings prioritise the what (so to speak) and not the how or why. On one hand, this makes decision-making a lot simpler for the crew, but on the other...well, in rare cases the lack of insight can exacerbate a disaster. Depending on when exactly the engine gave out, this poor crew might have been doomed either way, but they might have been able to minimise collateral damage if they knew just how badly crippled the aircraft was. And there was a very similar accident to this one (actually involving the predecessor of the MD-11, the DC-10), American Airlines 191 - one of the engines detached from the aircraft, damaging the leading edge of its wing in the process, causing that wing to stall when the crew slowed down below the stall speed of the damaged wing in a bid to climb. If they could have somehow known about the damage, the accident might have been avoided entirely as the crew might have known to keep their speed up.

I think too many of us are used to movies and TV (and Star-Trek-like scifi) that gives the incorrect view that extremely detailed information about the state of things is available.

The notification in the cockpit is likely nothing more than "ENG 2 FIRE" or similar. That could mean anything from "the fire is minor enough and we're at high enough speed that it's significantly safer to take off and then make an emergency landing", to "the engine has exploded and the wing is on fire and catastrophically damaged, so even though aborting takeoff now is dangerous and will likely cause us to overrun the runway, trying to continue would be worse".

It's a judgment call by the pilot to guess which of these is the case (or any possibility in between), and given the probabilities of various failure modes, I think it's fair for a pilot to assume it's something closer to the former than the latter.

I’m sure they knew there was an issue, but I don’t think the sensors can differentiate between “your engine is on fire, but if you can shut it down quickly, everything will be cool.” and “half your entire wing is on fire and your engine is pouring flame out the front/top instead of the back”

This puts an impractical amount of faith in the sensor wiring when the whole pylon and cowling are shredded.

Yes, the takeoff roll will be longer, the climb will be much more shallow, but it is possible to take off with one out of two engines (and obviously also with two out of three). Of course, after successful takeoff, the plane should turn around and land as soon as possible.

In this case however, with the wing already on fire (the engine is below the wing, so flames coming out of it would be visible behind and under the wing, not in front), I'm afraid that even if they had managed to take off, the fuel tank would have exploded or burned through the wing before they would have had a chance to land. Actually, this looks similar to the 2000 Concorde crash...

That being said, depending on how you lose the engine it can really mess up the takeoff; AA191 was lost when an engine detached from the plane on takeoff and took out part of the wing and hydraulic system with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

Single engine planes (GA, and some military planes) don’t handle this condition well at all.

In fact, for awhile (maybe still the case), the #1 killer of skydivers was single engine failure on takeoff from the jump plane (and similar aircraft failures), not accidents ‘while skydiving’.

Lack of thrust in the "taken out by debris" sense seems to be the case here.

And having 2 out of 3 engines fail (or underperform) would explain the insufficient climb thrust.

Yup makes sense. Now seeing photos of the entire left engine on the ground by the runway and the implication that however it failed it might have damaged the tail engine.

Agree, looks like an engine disruption.

The rotation already exacerbates the flow into that engine. Change in flow geometry gets more smoke in its way when it's already eating turbulent air.

We don't know if it just had a disruption or a full-blown stall, but give the way it made it to takeoff speed and then just gave out, stall seems likely.