Processes 2 million packages per day
The facility at Muhammad Ali International Airport sprawls across the equivalent of 90 football fields.
It processes 2 million packages per day in a facility. It has the ability to handle even more: It has the capacity for 416,000 packages and documents per hour.
A time-lapse video UPS posted on YouTube shows planes taxiing to and from special cargo gates. Workers unload containers packed with cardboard boxes. Other employees load the boxes onto a conveyor belt, which delivers packages to workers who load them into other containers.
A UPS town
Some 20,000 people work at the center, making UPS the largest employer in the Louisville area, the company said on its website.
Louisville Metro Council member Betsy Ruhe said everyone in town knows someone who works at UPS.
“My heart goes out to everybody at UPS because this is a UPS town," Ruhe said. "My cousin’s a UPS pilot. My aide’s tennis partner is a UPS pilot. The intern in my office works overnight at UPS to pay for college."
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.
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.
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.
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.
UPS gets permission to fly its own planes in 1988UPS 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.