UPS plane crashes shortly after takeoff
at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International
Airport — prompting shelter-in-place order

Apparently during takeoff. Loaded with fuel. Social media has the initial, massive fireball.

A shame. Loss of life, and a lot of folks won't get their package. No info on "how many passengers "?? Post reporters are very ignorant. They are almost never ANY passengers on a cargo aircraft, they are crew members, not passengers.

The aircraft was on fire on or at the left side at rotation and began a roll to the left as it left the runway. Captured by someone in their car on social media.

The Schumer shutdown has now turned deadly. They don't mind if some Americans have to die if it means their illegals can get free healthcare.

A sadly too common cause of crashes on takeoff is failure to configure the wing flaps and leading edge devices for takeoff. Pilots on these big aircraft cannot see their wings, so cannot do an easy visual check of flaps and slats. Usually this error is because something disrupted the cockpit process flow, and the checklist got skipped over. My very experienced pilot and flight instructor father once said, about aircraft accidents....." and most of the time it was caused by doing something that we are specifically trained to not do during flight training." We'll see. Human error or machine malfunction?

Pretty obvious from the video the left engine was on fire right before lift- off.

Live shots showed some debris off (IIRC) the right side of the runway in the dirt. The helicopter pilot speculated he ran off the runway to the right and over corrected on rotation. I wasn't there, so take what I heard for what it's worth.

Agreeing with @DVC. Aircraft have "number of souls on board" not people or passengers.

While not allowed currently, UPS was granted a minor exception to the No Passenger rule on cargo carriers. A pilot may fly as a "deadheading" passenger in a cockpit jump seat, if enroute to an airport where said pilot is scheduled to fly an originating flight, as their cargo aircraft are mostly wide bodies without passenger seating, windows, or lavatories. In the 1990s, UPS was permitted to use roll-on seating onto their narrow body 727 cargo aircraft but the brief experiment wasn't profitable and was discontinued. In 2005, regular employees were prohibited from flying as passengers cargo aircraft for security reasons. In 1994, a disgruntled Fed Ex employee, Auburn Calloway, attempted to take over Cargo Flt. 107 and crash the plane into the Memphis HQ building in order to gift his family of the $2.5M policy, provided by the company he literally sought to destroy. He feared he was going to be terminated for falsifying his flight records and believed he was the object of racial discrimination by his employers. The flight crew members were severely injured, as the deranged employee attacked them with multiple hammers and a spear gun. He didn't want the crash investigation to show the crew were murdered, so he didn't want to use guns, thinking blunt force and puncture wounds would be consistent with a crash. After the pilot was disabled with a skull fracture and severed temporal artery, the co-pilot, ex-Naval aviator, put the aircraft, a DC-10-30 - with a three man flight crew - into a steep climb, then a rolled into a 140 degree bank, pinning the assailant against the overhead, while the other flight crew member sought to disarm Calloway. The fight continued until the plane was back on the ground in Memphis. The hijacker got life without parole.

I can imagine this conversation among city planners. What do you think about this application to build an oil recycling facility, directly on the westward bound runway flight path?" "OK with me. What could possibly go wrong?."

Not the fault of ATC. If an engine was on fire at takeoff, something broke or leaked.