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Tour
UPS Airlines Worldport and Surface Management Tour
Tuesday, August 5 - 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm
*Advanced Registration Required*
***The tour is currently full, however waitlist reservations are being accepted - please e-mail alex.gertsen@aaae.org with the request to be added to the waitlist***
Conference attendees will be privileged to an exclusive, behind the scenes tour of UPS Worldport, the most technologically advanced package sorting facility in the world! UPS’s Louisville air hub is the critical “all-points” facility in which millions of packages from every corner of the world are processed. UPS is the world’s largest package delivery service. Worldport is a four million square foot facility, which includes 19,000 conveyor belts stretching over 100 miles and an information superhighway that can process over 50 million transactions per hour. UPS Worldport, employs over 9,000 team members, and is the center of the hub and spoke delivery system of the world’s ninth largest airline. In 2006, UPS announced a $1 Billion expansion of its Louisville facilities that will increase its sorting capacity to 487,000 packages per hour; an increase of 60% and will grow the facility to over 5.2 million square feet under roof. Over 5,000 new employees will be added as a result of the expansion.
The tour will take conference participants into the sorting facility during the afternoon international push and will allow a glimpse into how packages are sorted. Packages picked up in the origin countries are sorted and placed on aircraft bound for one of UPS’s regional hubs serving Asia, Europe, Canada and Latin America. From there, much of that volume makes its way to Louisville. Once the shipments arrive, overhead cameras positioned throughout Worldport help direct each package over the hundreds of miles of high-speed conveyors to the appropriate destination within the building. While the physical scale of Worldport is dazzling, the technology contained within its walls is the heart and soul of the operation. Long before the actual packages arrive, critical information associated with each shipment has already been captured in the origin country and transmitted to Worldport’s massive computer systems. This information is provided to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, whose on-site inspectors determine which shipments they want to review. Any shipment that requires inspection is automatically diverted to the Customs area, while those shipments that have been cleared are dispatched into the sorting operation. UPS’s visibility, tracking and sorting systems help to ensure that every shipment is processed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The tour will also put in perspective how ADS-B and other surface management technologies allow UPS to coordinate aircraft loading and arrivals/departures as part of this fascinating process.
Space is extremely limited! Be sure to check the “UPS Worldport Tour” box on the registration form!
For additional information please contact Alex Gertsen, AAAE.