Originally Posted by
BoilerUP
Respectfully Rick, please stop.
Nobody thinks anybody in upper management is staring at a computer screen watching planes takeoff and land.
But this was the third fatal accident UPS has had in 15 years, and it happened at the headquarters and primary sort facility of the airline, in a city where the UPS is the biggest employer.
It is completely reasonable to believe that immediately following a fatal accident on takeoff, with an engine and cowl on the grass west of 17R and video of a rolling fire after struggling into the air going viral on social media within 15 minutes, that all surveillence video pointing any direction west was immediately secured. Its also not a stretch to believe that some or all on a list including but not limited to Airline President, President of Flight Ops, Director of Ops, System Chief Pilot, Director of Safety, and MD11 Flight Standards & Training Manager reviewed the takeoff sequence footage within a couple hours of the accident prior to the NTSB securing the scene.
"Abundance of caution" doesn't mean three days and a manufacturer recommendation to ground later.
I suppose you can contrast this with the door plug, where AS grounded all of theirs within hours, and the FAA grounded the fleet the next day. But in that case the aircraft returned safely to a hub/mx base and was immediately available for company engineers to inspect. Like within minutes.
I still feel that UPS managers had reasonable priorities dealing with the crash and SDF on day one. For all they knew it was geese, etc. Yes, I know the culture well, my best friend has worked for UPS for decades.
If it was three days, yeah that's pushing it. I'd give them one day to pick up the pieces and then they should have had the right people looking at the video and making the right call on day two.
There's no reason to believe that the NTSB/FAA/ARFF just let random UPS managers run will-nilly through the accident scene, including the parts that ended up on the airport property. They normally restrict access to that, and then maybe you get to look at it later once formally designated a party to the investigation.