Plums of smoke rise from the area after a UPS cargo plane crashed and exploded while taking off at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Louisville, Kentucky. [AP Photo/Jon Cherry]

Tuesday evening, UPS Flight 2976 plummeted into a dense industrial area shortly after takeoff from Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport. At least 13 people are dead, including the three crew members and a child. Several others remain missing. The aircraft, loaded with 200,000 pounds of jet fuel for its flight to Hawaii, exploded into a massive fireball visible for miles.

On Thursday, UPS identified the crew members who were killed: Captain Richard Wartenberg, 1st Officer Lee Truitt, and International Relief Officer Captain Dana Diamond.

With even a slight deviation in the aircraft’s final moments, the death toll could have been hundreds or even thousands. The crash occurred in a corridor that includes Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant and UPS’s massive Worldport air freight hub, as well as dozens of warehouses and other industrial workplaces.

An investigation is underway, and more details will emerge about the immediate cause. It has already been confirmed that the plane’s left engine caught fire and detached during takeoff. Whatever chain of events in the aircraft’s systems led to the catastrophe, the ultimate cause is the subordination of American and world society to a corporate oligarchy.

There is a staggering contradiction at the heart of this disaster. Worldport’s facilities are among the most advanced in the world, with the ability to handle 370 flights and process more than 2 million packages a day. This is a remarkable feat of computation, planning, human skill and global coordination. UPS and its rivals are also rapidly introducing new systems in their warehouses based on the latest advances in automation and artificial intelligence.

This advanced logistics system, however, is subordinated to the ruthless pursuit of profit, powered by highly exploited workers. The plane that crashed outside Louisville was part of an aging fleet. The MD-11 model, which has the second-worst safety record of all commercial aircraft, was 34 years old and had reportedly undergone major repairs, including a cracked fuel tank, as recently as September.

This is the third UPS crash in the past 12 years. UPS pilots have repeatedly demanded fatigue protections equal to those for passenger crews, only to be met with stonewalling by corporate management and federal regulators.

UPS has sought to intimidate and silence whistleblowers, including UPS Captain Douglas Greene, who was fired and blacklisted after exposing fatigue and other unsafe conditions that led to the 2013 crash in Birmingham, Alabama that killed two crew members. Greene told the WSWS that this week’s crash “was not only avoidable, it was caused by UPS’s negligence.”

New technologies that could and should be used to ease the burden of labor and improve safety are of interest to the oligarchy only to the extent that they can be used to ramp up exploitation. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 1.1 million jobs have been cut so far this year, the highest level since 2020. Artificial intelligence and automation are being used as weapons to eliminate entire sections of the workforce and drive millions into poverty.

This is why, alongside staggering technological advances, American infrastructure is underfunded, decaying and unsafe.

Fireballs erupting over industrial areas have become a regular feature of life. Barely 24 hours after the UPS crash, a huge ammonia explosion ripped through a chemical plant in Yazoo City, Mississippi. In October, 16 workers were killed in an explosion at a munitions plant in Tennessee. Also last month, an explosion at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery rocked the Los Angeles area. And these are only a few of the most recent.

Friday marks seven months since the death of autoworker Ronald Adams Sr., who was crushed to death by a gantry while performing maintenance at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Complex near Detroit. With management and the UAW bureaucracy maintaining a guilty silence, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) launched an investigation into the accident, with preliminary findings presented at a July 27 meeting.

Since that meeting, hundreds have been killed internationally, including, most recently, 16 garment workers in a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh; two coal miners in Australia; and 23 workers in an explosion at a retail site in Hermosillo, Mexico. These disasters underscore the global character of the industrial slaughterhouse.

The UPS air disaster occurred in the midst of the ongoing government shutdown, now the longest in American history. The Trump administration is using starvation as a weapon against federal workers and the poor. Particularly cruel is its refusal to release food stamp funding for 42 million people, immediately plunging a large portion of the country into food insecurity.

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Louisville are working without pay. While not a direct cause of the crash, air traffic controllers are being forced to choose between working stressful, technical jobs for free or taking unpaid leave to feed their families. On Thursday, the government announced a 10 percent reduction in air traffic nationwide, warning of a total collapse of the national airspace system if the shutdown is not ended within days.

The United States is a government of, by, and for the oligarchy, headed by would-be dictator Donald Trump. His administration represents the seamless integration of the capitalist elite and the state. The elimination of the Chemical Safety Board next year, along with deep cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulatory agencies, demonstrates this policy in practice. Trump’s new head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), David Keeling, is the former UPS safety chief.

As far as the ruling class is concerned, corporate entities receive total impunity. On Thursday, a judge dropped criminal charges against Boeing over its massive safety scandal, in which hundreds died because management concealed known issues with its aircraft. Boeing, a major defense contractor that is battling 3,000 striking workers at its fighter jet plants in St. Louis, is being lavished by Trump with tens of billions of dollars in new contracts.

In return for Trump’s services, the tech billionaires are paying for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and its replacement with a massive new ballroom.

The union bureaucracy, concerned only with maintaining its privileges and access to power, is a full partner in this process. Mass automation-led layoffs began at UPS almost as soon as the ink was dry on the 2023 contract signed by the Teamsters bureaucracy. The union has said almost nothing about these cuts and issued only a muted statement on the disaster. But Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien has been far more vocal in his support for Trump, using “America First” rhetoric to blame corporate job cuts on foreign workers.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for workers in logistics, transportation, manufacturing, and every industry to take up the fight for control over production through the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must form the basis for a counter-offensive by the working class, transferring power from the trade union bureaucracies to the shop floor. They must unite workers internationally in a common struggle against the social counterrevolution being waged by the capitalist oligarchy.

Disasters like Tuesday’s crash are not accidents, but the outcome of a system that subordinates every aspect of life to private profit. The colossal cost to society of capitalist enrichment, built up through the labor of the working class, is incompatible with even the most basic requirements of safety, health or democratic rights.

The immense technological capacity of modern society stands in irreconcilable conflict with the private ownership of production by a parasitic elite. It is also incompatible with democracy—the real reason behind Trump’s rise.

The operation of the logistics and transportation networks must be organized for public need, not private profit. To guarantee safe working conditions, modern equipment and humane scheduling, workers must fight for:

The expropriation of the corporate oligarchy, using its trillions in wealth to fund rapid improvements in living standards;

The nationalization of the banks and the major logistics, manufacturing and aerospace corporations, to be run as public utilities;

Democratic control by the working class over production, including exclusive authority on all issues of safety.

The working class must insist on its own social rights—to decent jobs, healthcare, and a livable future—and take direct action through these committees to enforce them. Above all, this struggle requires a conscious political break with capitalism and the fight for socialism. The incompatibility of modern society with private profit can be resolved only through the establishment of workers’ power and the socialist reorganization of economic life.