UPS recently gave me a tour of the company’s 5.2 million square foot Worldport facility in Louisville, KY. This overnight shipping/sorting facility accepts, sorts, and reloads at a rate of 416,000 packages per hour (that’s 115 packages a second).
With over 130 aircraft and an average of 1.6 million packages traveling through Worldport on a daily basis, this facility is not just a massive (and efficient) mailroom, it is a wonder of contemporary automation.
Over a hundred planes fly into Louisville International Airport every night and unload at Worldport, which is on the airport grounds. Packages are sorted and reloaded before the planes return to their respective cities, and all of this happens within a matter of a few hours.
Since the facility does most of its operations at night, I found myself on an airport runway at about 1:30 in the morning. The sheer size of the UPS operation makes itself known at this hour, as planes land within just minutes of each other (sometimes less).
Inside Worldport, UPS employees are hard at work dragging cargo bins over more than 1.2 million casters-and-ball transfer units, emptying packages onto a 155-mile serpentine of conveyors, and scanning every package multiple times in 546 camera tunnels.
Much of the onsite staff at Worldport consists of students from the local college and tech school, to whom UPS provides a tuition support program for working the graveyard shift for $10 an hour.
