“But you don’t ever think it would happen to you.” — Kyla Kennedy, server at Stooges Bar and Grill, near SDF (as quoted by CNN)
The first time I ever gave any thought to the risk of a plane crashing into a chemical plant was when an acquaintance approached me at a conference with the problem. He told me, “An inspector from the EPA is citing us for not including a plane crashing into our plant as a scenario. How likely is that?”
After a lot of research, a colleague and I published a paper, “Rare but Conceivable: Determining the Likelihood of Meteors and Other Infrequent Events.” In the paper we said, “In the aftermath of a rare but devastating disaster, there is a tendency to overestimate how frequent such an event may be, hence a tendency to overestimate the risk associated with such an event.” Among the rare events we looked at were plane crashes.
On Tuesday evening, November 4, 2025, at around 5:15 pm, UPS Flight 2976 took off from the Louisville International Airport (SDF) in Kentucky, bound for Honolulu, Hawaii. Immediately after take-off, it crashed, hitting two businesses. One was Kentucky Petroleum Recycling.
Tragically, all three members of the crew, as well as eleven others on the ground, died in the crash. Three of those on the ground worked at Kentucky Petroleum Recycling
What are the chances?
What Is Kentucky Petroleum Recycling
Kentucky Petroleum Recycling is a chemical process facility, owned by GFL Environmental since August 2023. The facility, sitting on a 3,800 square meter (0.93 acres) lot a short distance south of the SDF fenceline, used a variety of chemical separation and reaction operations to recycle used oils and fuels and to reprocess spent antifreeze. The oil recycling included
- Dewatering
- Demulsification
- Filtration
- Acid treatment
- Vacuum distillation
- Catalytic hydrotreating
while the antifreeze reprocessing included
- Filtration
- Distillation
- Ion exchange
- Reformulation with additives to restore glycol to original quality and performance
The small facility included a tank farm with two horizontal tanks and another with 25 vertical tanks, undoubtedly for storing collected material and intermediates, as well as finished product.
When UPS Flight 2976 crashed into the facility, there was a lot to burn in addition to the 38,000 gallons of jet fuel the MD-11 carried to make its 8½ hour flight to Honolulu. Fortunately, the relief valves on the tanks worked to protect against pressure vessel explosions, which would have resulted from what many would recognize as a classic external fire pressure relief case. At the time, though, bystanders mistook the sound of relief devices lifting as explosions.
It was certainly a chemical process facility in every sense of the term.
Calculating the Chances
The 2019 paper described two methodologies for calculating event frequency of airplane crashes into a facility. One is for facilities further away from an airport than 10 km (6.1 miles); the other is for facilities within that 10 km radius.
There were reports that the plane crash was “approximately 3 miles south of the airfield.” However, an examination with Google Earth indicates that the facility was very near the airport fenceline and was about 2.4 km (~1.5 miles) from the center of the airport. (Three miles is more consistent with the driving distance from the airport to Kentucky Petroleum Recycling.) Given this close proximity, the methodology for facilities within a 10 km radius of an airport is appropriate.
The calculation is straightforward:
H = h · e(-0.5/km · R) · f · AFACILITY / (2π km · R)
Where
H is the frequency of airplane crashes into the facility (crashes/year)
h is the global crash factor (1.23·10-6 crashes/flight)
R is the distance of the facility from the airport (2.4 km)
f is the frequency of flights from the airport considered (flights/year)
AFACILITY is the area of the facility (0.0038 km2)
2π km · R is the area of the 1 km wide annular segment at distance R from the airport (15.1 km2)
The global crash factor in 2017 was 1.3 ·10-7 crashes per flight, but during the last five years the average crash factor is almost an order of magnitude higher.
The last variable required by the equation is the frequency of flights from SDF. According to the most recent data from SDF, there were 189,832 flights during the 12 months that ended with September 2025.
The frequency, then, at which Kentucky Petroleum Recycling could have expected to experience a plane crash was (and is) 1.77·10-5 crashes per year, or approximately once every 60,000 years. The crash on November 4 didn’t change the likelihood at SDL or near any other airport, for that matter.
Kyla Kennedy was right to believe that it wouldn’t happen to her.
Plane Crashes Into Process Facilities Remain Exceedingly Rare
When we first looked into the question of plane crashes into process facilities, we could only find three incidents in the United States: one in 1949 in Dallas, Texas, one in 1985 in Kansas City, Kansas, and one in 2016 in Lubbock, Texas. Now, sadly, we have one more to add to the list: one in 2025 in Louisville, Kentucky. Nonetheless, four crashes into the approximately 15,000 process facilities in the United States over the course of 111 years of commercial aviation remains exceedingly rare.
It is best to leave it to the National Transportation Safety Board to sort out what happened to UPS Flight 2976. Regardless, there is no reason to fault Kentucky Petroleum Recycling for its proximity to SDF. Our hearts go out to the friends, family, and coworkers of those who lost their lives. For us, any fatality involving the chemical process industries is a tragedy.
