Inside the world of UPS’ overnight shipping hub

You know how Disney World is so big that it kind of operates like its own tiny town? UPS’ Worldport, at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Kentucky, might not be the most magical place on Earth. But it does sorta run like a theme park. 

“There goes one of the Disney shuttles,” said Jeff Sierota, vice president of Worldport operations, as he points at one of the employee buses.

Worldport is the size of 90 football fields, employs 13,000 workers and processes around 2 million packages daily. It’s why it has its own infrastructure. There’s a hotel of sorts for pilots who need to rest and food trucks slinging tacos. Worldport also has its own meteorologists, mechanics, pilots and a training facility with maybe the most Disney-adjacent thing of all: flight simulators.

All of this supports UPS’ overnight shipping, which often requires air travel. Some packages are put into the cargo area of a commercial flight. But these days, most major logistics companies like FedEx, Amazon and UPS have their own airport operations. Nearly 70% of anything UPS ships for next-day delivery passes through the hub, usually in the middle of the night, when traffic at the commercial side of the airport is practically nonexistent. Around 300 hundred UPS flights take off and land here every day.

“This aircraft literally just arrived, so we’re greeting the aircraft with our crew stair right now,” said Sierota as a Boeing 767 powers down.

It’s around midnight, and the flight came in from Newark, New Jersey. The cargo inside is a mix of stuff: mostly products straight from manufacturers and products ordered by shoppers just hours ago that have been packaged for delivery. These goods are stopping at Worldport for a layover of sorts before catching a flight to their final destination. 

We watch as workers wheel out a lift that raises up to align with the cargo door of the plane. They start unloading large, steel containers, two at a time. From the outside, it looks like a regular airplane. But on the inside, there are no seats, bathrooms or luggage bins.

“What we’re looking at right now is where the people would generally be,” Sierota said. “The seats would be in that top side, and right now it’s just one giant tube where we’re obviously fitting these containers in.” 

The containers are shaped exactly like the inside of the airplane, curved on top to match the roof and flat on the front, back and bottom so they can fit together like puzzle pieces.

“Some of them have a different shape because different compartments of the aircraft have different shapes, so we literally are maximizing as much of that air frame as we possibly can,” Sierota said.

Air freight is expensive, and every inch counts. 

Workers lower the containers to the ground. Two people walk over and start pulling one toward the building with relative ease, even though with cargo inside, it could weigh as much as 10,000 pounds.

“The wheels on the floor help us move the containers that come off of the aircraft,” Sierota said.

There are rows of small wheels everywhere: outside on a floor covering the pavement, inside on the floor of the facility and in the planes too. The wheels are almost flush with the ground, raised up just enough for the containers to roll over them.

“The only way we’re going to be able to move those around inside the building is on this caster deck system,” Sierota said. “You know, two people, we can move the majority of our containers inside the facility.”

After the containers are rolled inside, workers unload the cargo and sort it by destination. This part of Worldport is industrial and loud. It’s mostly a massive conveyor belt system. It’s multiple floors — layers and layers of conveyor belts. In total, there are 155 miles of them. And they shuttle packages around fast, because with one-day shipping, UPS can’t waste a minute. 

“Within 15 minutes, the majority of those packages are going to be ready for their outbound load,” Sierota said.

Everything that’s been flown or trucked in today goes out tonight — except in the case of bad weather, which is rare. UPS picked Louisville because it doesn’t get a lot of extreme heat or snow. Plus, it’s a sort of central American city. At the facility’s busiest hour, a UPS plane takes off every minute. 

“Once we get into the meat of the launch, we’re departing one after another,” Sierota said.

Sure enough, as we’re leaving around 2 a.m., the airport is buzzing with activity. Planes with brown UPS tails line up at nearly every gate and taxi around the runway. Worldport will be abuzz until around 5 a.m., when the final planes depart.

“On a clear night like tonight, you can see the aircraft little white dots in the sky, lined up, coming in,” Sierota said. “And when they go out, it’s literally one after another.”

And this is what it takes: thousands of workers, miles of conveyor belts, one plane after another taking flight, to get you that avocado slicer or weighted blanket you impulse ordered — and get it to you tomorrow.