NOTE TO READERS A previous version of this post contained several errors, which I attribute to working in haste and deeply regret. It has been replaced and updated with this one. Thank you to loyal readers who brought the mistakes to my attention. I promise to do better.

A UPS airplane crashed while attempting to take off from Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Kentucky’s largest city on Tuesday evening. Several cameras documented the spectacle, the plane racing down the runway, a fire blooming from the left engine as the nose rotated up, followed less than 10 seconds later by a massive explosion that jetissoned pieces of the airplane across the tarmac.

The most dramatic footage, which I initially dismissed as AI-generated, has been confirmed as dashcam video from the truck of Lavalle Transportation of Pottstown, NY.  The driver was parked by the runway as the disaster unfolded.

These three screenshots show the left wing emerging from the left side of the fireball fireball. And I slowed down the video of the same thing that follows.

The three-engine MD-11, was headed for Honolulu and was loaded with fuel sufficient for 9 hours of flight. On Wednesday morning, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg reported the full casualty list is not complete, but at least 9 people are dead and 11 injured.  The same uncertainty is the case for assessing the extent of the physical damage to the businesses and structures located in the industrial area north of the runway where the airplane came to rest.

UPS operates a large distribution hub know as Worldport in Louisville, where some 20 thousand people work. The cargo carrier operates 300 flights a day using, in addition to the MD-11, Boeing 767s and 747s and the Airbus A300. It also flies the smaller Boeing 757.

No video has emerged showing what might have initiated the fire seen already underway on the left engine or wing. The source could be an engine failure, a ruptured fuel line or fuel tank or damage to the plane from undetected debris on the runway.

The latter scenario calls to mind the Air France Concorde disaster that killed 113 people when the plane crashed shortly after taking off from Charles DeGaulle airport in July 2000. During the takeoff roll, Flight 4590 ran over a piece of metal that came off a just-departed Continental Airlines airliner. (Now part of United.) The metal strike triggered a chain of events that caused a fuel tank to fail and leaking fuel to ignite. Less than 2 minutes later, the plane slammed into a nearby airport hotel.

A takeoff crash in Chicago in 1979, on a DC-10, the predecessor to the MD-11, also shares similarities. American Airlines Flight 191 lost its left engine during takeoff and once airborne, it immediately rolled left, and plunged to the ground. Engine maintenance and mounting procedures contributed to the disaster, which killed 273 people.

A more recent accident is the June crash of Air India Flight 171. The Boeing 787 departing from Ahmedabad to London failed to gain altitude and ploughed into a medical school dormitory near the airport, killing 260 people. The cause of that accident has not been determined.

These disasters and, I’ll add, the mid-air collision of American Airlines Flight 5342 with an Army helicopter near Washington Reagan National Airport in January, demonstrate how quickly things can go wrong during the critical phases of flight: takeoff and landing. When they do, pilots have precious little time.

What today’s accidents have that the Concorde and DC-10 crashes did not is an abundance of cameras that document, frame-by-frame, airport operations, takeoff runs and planes in flight. What has already been captured on tape in Louisville and what may turn up in the next few days is certain to be of extraordinary value to official investigators and of great interest to armchair investigators, too.