Six nights a week, between 11:30 p.m. and 2 a.m., in the skies high above Louisville, Ky., more than 100 UPS aircraft from around the globe – ranging from huge "Browntail" 747s to much smaller 727s – converge on UPS Worldport
®, the futuristic UPS air hub.
Over the next few hours, 5,000 UPS night owls – many of them college students from the Louisville area or local professionals working second, part-time jobs – unload, sort and reload domestic and international air packages onto outgoing planes.
Opened in 2002, Worldport can process up to 1 million packages a night. It offers such a snapshot of global commerce at work that many customers visit just to see the spectacle. In fact, chances are that if your company sends parcels across the country overnight, they will make a stop at Worldport.
Powered by sophisticated sorting technology and a central database that monitors some 59 million transactions every hour, parcels and boxes of every shape and size enter what can be likened to a neural network of automated ramps, conveyor belts and bins. The routes taken may look random, but every dip and curl is carefully orchestrated by each package's bar-coded label. A typical package makes a roughly two-mile journey through Worldport's conveyors in about 13 minutes.
About 95 percent of packages arrive at Worldport affixed with a "smart label," which contains the critical information that will optimize their route. At points along the way, infrared scanners read the smart labels, allowing the company to know precisely where packages are at all times. As UPS spokesman Mark Giuffre confirms, "If a customer called and asked where their package was, we could tell them exactly where it was in Worldport."
Worldport currently occupies 4 million square feet, four floors and three concourses brimming with 43 aircraft docks, but UPS is thinking even bigger. In May 2006, UPS announced that Worldport will undergo a $1 billion expansion. This past November, an airport project to lengthen one of the runways was completed, enabling UPS to launch larger planes with enough fuel to reach Asia nonstop.
This article was originally published in the Winter 2007 print edition of Compass.
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