November 5, 2025 • 15 mins
WLKY helicopter pilot Bill DeReamer and photojournalist Scott Eckhardt flew above the UPS airplane crash in Louisville, providing video visuals for the world.
DeReamer explained the feelings and responsibilities in filming a tragedy just moments after it occurred.
DeReamer explained the feelings and responsibilities in filming a tragedy just moments after it occurred.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The guy who flies the Wlky helicopter. His name is
Bill Dreamer, who served in our US Army. Bill, I'm
sorry to have you on under these circumstances, but I
always appreciate a chat with you.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Okay, there you are here. Audio went away there for
a minute. Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I want to ask you, Bill, what happened yesterday in
terms of you being informed there was an issue near
the airport and were you already flying or did you
load up in the helicopter and go and bring these
visuals that are being seen around the world.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Now Now, Actually, yesterday I was back at Bowman getting
some fuel in my photojournalists in the backseat who I
think you know? Scott Eckhart called me and he says, Bill,
the smoke and the sky is incredible. Something's going on.
I need you to come back to the station and
pick me up. So I ran down to the helicopter
(00:51):
and flew down and picked him up. And when I
got in the air immediately I could tell it wasn't
something that you see every day. It wasn't a normal occurrence.
The black smoke had already reached Bowmenfield and quite frankly,
when I was flying from Bowman down to the TV
station to pick Scot up. Bowmanfield, which is almost five
(01:14):
miles away from Muhammad Ali Airport, had all the training
aircraft in the pattern made them land because of the
visibility issues with that thick black smoke from the burning jetfield.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Terry was there traffic in the air still at Louisville
International there were approaching aircraft right when this happened. And
then that obviously they had them land on the other runway.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Now and that was interesting. So, you know, the magnitude
of this started to set in once I picked up
Scott and we were flying down to the airport. That
is the time of day when UPS has one of
their very busiest pushes. It starts around or so and
goes to five point thirty five forty. I don't know
(02:04):
the exact number, but I know anywhere from probably thirty
forty UPS planes depart. When I flew down to the airport,
there was no departures, no arrivals. They must have immediately center,
who is the folks that coordinates all these planes coming
(02:27):
in must have started diverting them right away. Now, what
was occurring was all these UPS planes that were down
on the taxiways getting ready to depart. We're just sitting
at various places on the airport for a significant amount
of time, which I found to be very interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
You were able to get into an area and shoot
video that Scott Eckhart was shooting video that was you know,
you were right on top of this. So how are
you allowed into that airspace around that close to an airport?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, normally, you know, on an everyday occurrence, we call
that Louisvio International. Their airspace is a five mile circumference
from the center of that airport. After I picked up Scott,
I asked the air traffic controllers if I could fly
down to the airport, and to my surprise, he said, Bill,
(03:25):
we have He didn't call me Bill, but he says,
we have no traffic. You're free to go anywhere you want. Now.
We were up there and then LMPD they're called Air thirty.
They were in the air doing research and recovery. They
were using I'm guessing maybe their thermal camera or the
(03:45):
camera on board. They were working with ground folks trying
to find victims of this accident. But we basically for
man i'd say almost an hour, had a free rain
until the FEDS, and it doesn't matter at this point,
or quite frankly, back then, it didn't matter. But they
threw up what's called a TFR, which is a temporary
(04:06):
flight restriction, and that was five miles And if you
saw any of our video from later in the evening,
you could tell we were pushed back significantly from where
we were earlier. But to my amazement, the first hour
or so, we were literally right on top of where
the accident was.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Once you were there, hovering around the crash site, did
you hear any other voices from air traffic control? Because
I was under the impression that they were told to
get out of the tower because of the smoke, the
danger of the smoke being toxic.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Now and that's interesting too. It was so silent for
so long that I made a couple of calls myself
to the tower just to make sure they're in operation.
When we were done, or when the TFR they pushed
us further away, I shouldn't say we were done. We
actually went over to Bowman's airspace again, which has a
(05:04):
little and I know this makes sense to you, Terry,
because you fly and you're big into aviation, but Bowman
has a cutout that actually goes into the International Louiso
International's airspace. International is the ruling or the higher class
of an airport, but bowman Field has a cutout, and
(05:26):
they allowed me to go over there and operate until
we were done. Probably about eight thirty they cleared us
to go back and land, so we've been up for
a little over two hours. At that point, Bowmanfield, for
the most part, was operating. They'd gone back to normal operations. Stanford.
(05:48):
I did not fly the late show. One of my
backup pilots, gentlemen called Brian Arnold, came in and flew
from roughly nine till about eleven thirty. It got challenging
because they had closed the tower there, just as you
had said, for concern from the smoke and the fumes.
(06:11):
But when Brian flew last night, he was talking with
Indianapolis Center and he left me a text that I
received this morning and said, Bill, when you go back
up tomorrow morning, you need to reach out to Indianapolis Center,
which was a challenge. I never really got any permission
to get back into the airspace, so we just basically
(06:34):
stayed outside of that. The five mile circumference and the
TFR from last night had been rescinded, but we didn't
want a chance it. So if you saw an air
video from this morning, we were down near Brooks Road,
which is about five about six miles south of the
(06:55):
big airport there.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I did say here in Louisville that Traycon was still operating.
That's terminal radar appro control. So were some people still
left in the tower or are they down on a
ground level facility? Do you know how that works? Because
I don't.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
I don't, And from my understanding is they cleared out
the they cleared out the tower complete. And you know
what's interesting. When Scott and I were flying earlier, I
don't remember the exact time, but I remember telling Scott explicitly.
I said, Scott, all the power at Ford the plant
down there on Fern Valley. I saw all the lights
(07:32):
go out, and I'm wondering if that might have been
a concern at Louisville International. Also, you know, I know
i'd heard and I had no confirmation if it was
smoke and fumes, but I'm it might have been a
combination of that and a concern with tower. But after
eight thirty we never heard from anybody in the tower
(07:54):
at Louisville International.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, they shut down operations obviously until early this morning,
when you and Scott were flying closer to the damage.
Was Scott able to zoom in and see if there
was any fuselage still intact now?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And and I can't really answer for Scott, he's sitting
here right next to me, But there were the flames
and the smoke were so thick. You know, normally I
will watch what he is shooting on my monitor, and
you just could not stid it was it was incredible, Terry,
(08:33):
It's it's it's sad. Never seen anything like it. I
hope I never seen anything like it again.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well, we're all praying for these victims. It's just it is.
It's a tragic situation. And I just wanted how how
was this for you emotionally to be over a scene
like this that looked like a war zone, Because usually
you're just flying and you guys are taking video of
traffic and other things that are happening on the ground.
(09:02):
So how difficult was this for you to push through
your job with this overwhelming sense of gloom and doom?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, to put it in perspective, and Scott and I
talked about it earlier. We had gone up to Lexington
earlier yesterday to shoot foliage. I'll put it on my
Facebook page later today. The beauty of that, and then
to come back and be at the airport and to
(09:34):
be called up to see this. So the spectrum that
we experienced yesterday was incredible. That just the amount and
I know everybody on the ground saw that black smoke.
If you could have experienced it from the air, it
just intensified the magnitude of this tragedy. I've never seen
(09:56):
anything like it. I've seen plane crashes before, I've seen
small plane crashes. I've never seen a big plane crash
like this, but even on television, I've never seen anything
like this. In the sheer size of the of the
debris field, it was just massive. The amount of Scott
(10:17):
described it, and I hate to use this term as
a cliche, but he said today when we were up
he called it a war zone. They just the background here.
They have rescinded the five mile TFR to a three
mile and when we moved in just another two miles
is incredible. How much of the damage you could see
(10:42):
down there, and the massive amount of recovery operations that
are going down there, whether they're local law enforcement, whether
it's folks from the NTSB and the FAA. But there
is a massive operation still going on. They're probably not
so much firefighting but probably recovery at this.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Point, right And obviously this tragedy is horrific, and then
we have all of our equipment and all of our
resources naturally taking care of it, while the rest of
the city, you know, we're just we have our fingers crossed.
Nothing else goes sideways where we need. Some of these
first responders, God bless them. All they were on top
of this.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Thing was a stand. They deserve a pad on their back.
That was the other thing that we were reporting on
last night, that the massive response to this that just
you could see red lights from any direction of that
airport is agencies were responding, and then you could see
(11:47):
the blue lights from the police who were closing down
roads and directing traffic. The one thing that I kept
reporting on yesterday, just from all my years of doing this,
is I was pleading with folks not to come down
there and be a gawker, just based on the operation
that was going on. Sometimes it's hard for folks not
(12:08):
to want to go try to see this firsthand. But
the response was incredible last night, Terry. I know that's
kind of hard for folks to imagine unless they were watching,
you know, watching our video. But a lot of time
we were focused on the craft scene itself. So you
(12:30):
know we're going, we're getting ready to go back up
from the five to six thirty. If folks want to
get an idea of what it looks like today, tune
into WLKY at five o'clock will be about three miles
south and they'll be able to see the operations that
are taking place right now.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Last thing for you, I know you've looked at your
own video. We saw the engine. The NTSB did confirm
that was an engine from this ill fated UPS flight,
as aside the runway and then the tear in the
roof of what I think is a UPS like storage
cargo facility in that roof that was substantial, But the
(13:15):
aircraft continued onwards, so it must have still been in
some kind of a climb. And I guess we'll learn eventually,
but we'll be able to see that tonight, more of
that sort of what's happened to the buildings and get
a better idea of what these poor pilots were going
through trying to get this thing airborne.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, and you know, you bring up some good topics
you get caught up in the scene. I can remember
when we were flying down there something that caught my
eye that we really never shot video of. There was
a white, very faint, white plume of smoke that was
coming from the grassy area about three quarters of the
way down the runway. It caught my eye, and in hindsight,
(13:59):
I wish I had asked Goot to move the camera
over to try to shoot video of that, because the
area we're in now, we can't identify or we can't
find that engine that you're seeing in some of these
still pitchers, and I'm almost sure that that white plume
(14:19):
of smoke was coming from that engine. The one thing
we did get is Scott said, Bill, look at that
warehouse over there, look at the tear in the roof,
and I think what you're going to see on that
one is you were correct that plane was trying to fly.
That would have been the tail or the wheels that
caught that warehouse. And because it's the north end of
(14:43):
that warehouse or the area of the warehouse where the
plane would have gone over first has the damage, but
the south end of that warehouse has no damage, which
leads me to believe that that plane, as you'd indicated,
was flying at that point, just didn't have enough powering
to continue on with the.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Flight, didn't have the left maybe one end two both
went out and just left three operating. It's just a
horrible situation with the NTSB will sift through it and
let us know. Bill Dreamer, thank you so much for
your insights on this, and also give thanks to Scott Eckhart,
the photographer on board your Wlky helicopter last night taking
video scene around the world. I appreciate your time and
we'll watch for you on the five.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
All right, Thanks Terry, good talking with you.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
That is Bill Dreamer like we call him Chopper Bill
The guy who flies the Wlky helicopter. His name is
Bill Dreamer, who served in our US Army. Bill, I'm
sorry to have you on under these circumstances, but I
always appreciate a chat with you.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Okay, there you are here. Audio went away there for
a minute. Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I want to ask you, Bill, what happened yesterday in
terms of you being informed there was an issue near
the airport and were you already flying or did you
load up in the helicopter and go and bring these
visuals that are being seen around the world.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Now Now, Actually, yesterday I was back at Bowman getting
some fuel in my photojournalists in the backseat who I
think you know? Scott Eckhart called me and he says, Bill,
the smoke and the sky is incredible. Something's going on.
I need you to come back to the station and
pick me up. So I ran down to the helicopter
(00:51):
and flew down and picked him up. And when I
got in the air immediately I could tell it wasn't
something that you see every day. It wasn't a normal occurrence.
The black smoke had already reached Bowmenfield and quite frankly,
when I was flying from Bowman down to the TV
station to pick Scot up. Bowmanfield, which is almost five
(01:14):
miles away from Muhammad Ali Airport, had all the training
aircraft in the pattern made them land because of the
visibility issues with that thick black smoke from the burning jetfield.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Terry was there traffic in the air still at Louisville
International there were approaching aircraft right when this happened. And
then that obviously they had them land on the other runway.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Now and that was interesting. So, you know, the magnitude
of this started to set in once I picked up
Scott and we were flying down to the airport. That
is the time of day when UPS has one of
their very busiest pushes. It starts around or so and
goes to five point thirty five forty. I don't know
(02:04):
the exact number, but I know anywhere from probably thirty
forty UPS planes depart. When I flew down to the airport,
there was no departures, no arrivals. They must have immediately center,
who is the folks that coordinates all these planes coming
(02:27):
in must have started diverting them right away. Now, what
was occurring was all these UPS planes that were down
on the taxiways getting ready to depart. We're just sitting
at various places on the airport for a significant amount
of time, which I found to be very interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
You were able to get into an area and shoot
video that Scott Eckhart was shooting video that was you know,
you were right on top of this. So how are
you allowed into that airspace around that close to an airport?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, normally, you know, on an everyday occurrence, we call
that Louisvio International. Their airspace is a five mile circumference
from the center of that airport. After I picked up Scott,
I asked the air traffic controllers if I could fly
down to the airport, and to my surprise, he said, Bill,
(03:25):
we have He didn't call me Bill, but he says,
we have no traffic. You're free to go anywhere you want. Now.
We were up there and then LMPD they're called Air thirty.
They were in the air doing research and recovery. They
were using I'm guessing maybe their thermal camera or the
(03:45):
camera on board. They were working with ground folks trying
to find victims of this accident. But we basically for
man i'd say almost an hour, had a free rain
until the FEDS, and it doesn't matter at this point,
or quite frankly, back then, it didn't matter. But they
threw up what's called a TFR, which is a temporary
(04:06):
flight restriction, and that was five miles And if you
saw any of our video from later in the evening,
you could tell we were pushed back significantly from where
we were earlier. But to my amazement, the first hour
or so, we were literally right on top of where
the accident was.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Once you were there, hovering around the crash site, did
you hear any other voices from air traffic control? Because
I was under the impression that they were told to
get out of the tower because of the smoke, the
danger of the smoke being toxic.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Now and that's interesting too. It was so silent for
so long that I made a couple of calls myself
to the tower just to make sure they're in operation.
When we were done, or when the TFR they pushed
us further away, I shouldn't say we were done. We
actually went over to Bowman's airspace again, which has a
(05:04):
little and I know this makes sense to you, Terry,
because you fly and you're big into aviation, but Bowman
has a cutout that actually goes into the International Louiso
International's airspace. International is the ruling or the higher class
of an airport, but bowman Field has a cutout, and
(05:26):
they allowed me to go over there and operate until
we were done. Probably about eight thirty they cleared us
to go back and land, so we've been up for
a little over two hours. At that point, Bowmanfield, for
the most part, was operating. They'd gone back to normal operations. Stanford.
(05:48):
I did not fly the late show. One of my
backup pilots, gentlemen called Brian Arnold, came in and flew
from roughly nine till about eleven thirty. It got challenging
because they had closed the tower there, just as you
had said, for concern from the smoke and the fumes.
(06:11):
But when Brian flew last night, he was talking with
Indianapolis Center and he left me a text that I
received this morning and said, Bill, when you go back
up tomorrow morning, you need to reach out to Indianapolis Center,
which was a challenge. I never really got any permission
to get back into the airspace, so we just basically
(06:34):
stayed outside of that. The five mile circumference and the
TFR from last night had been rescinded, but we didn't
want a chance it. So if you saw an air
video from this morning, we were down near Brooks Road,
which is about five about six miles south of the
(06:55):
big airport there.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I did say here in Louisville that Traycon was still operating.
That's terminal radar appro control. So were some people still
left in the tower or are they down on a
ground level facility? Do you know how that works? Because
I don't.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
I don't, And from my understanding is they cleared out
the they cleared out the tower complete. And you know
what's interesting. When Scott and I were flying earlier, I
don't remember the exact time, but I remember telling Scott explicitly.
I said, Scott, all the power at Ford the plant
down there on Fern Valley. I saw all the lights
(07:32):
go out, and I'm wondering if that might have been
a concern at Louisville International. Also, you know, I know
i'd heard and I had no confirmation if it was
smoke and fumes, but I'm it might have been a
combination of that and a concern with tower. But after
eight thirty we never heard from anybody in the tower
(07:54):
at Louisville International.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, they shut down operations obviously until early this morning,
when you and Scott were flying closer to the damage.
Was Scott able to zoom in and see if there
was any fuselage still intact now?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And and I can't really answer for Scott, he's sitting
here right next to me, But there were the flames
and the smoke were so thick. You know, normally I
will watch what he is shooting on my monitor, and
you just could not stid it was it was incredible, Terry,
(08:33):
It's it's it's sad. Never seen anything like it. I
hope I never seen anything like it again.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Well, we're all praying for these victims. It's just it is.
It's a tragic situation. And I just wanted how how
was this for you emotionally to be over a scene
like this that looked like a war zone, Because usually
you're just flying and you guys are taking video of
traffic and other things that are happening on the ground.
(09:02):
So how difficult was this for you to push through
your job with this overwhelming sense of gloom and doom?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, to put it in perspective, and Scott and I
talked about it earlier. We had gone up to Lexington
earlier yesterday to shoot foliage. I'll put it on my
Facebook page later today. The beauty of that, and then
to come back and be at the airport and to
(09:34):
be called up to see this. So the spectrum that
we experienced yesterday was incredible. That just the amount and
I know everybody on the ground saw that black smoke.
If you could have experienced it from the air, it
just intensified the magnitude of this tragedy. I've never seen
(09:56):
anything like it. I've seen plane crashes before, I've seen
small plane crashes. I've never seen a big plane crash
like this, but even on television, I've never seen anything
like this. In the sheer size of the of the
debris field, it was just massive. The amount of Scott
(10:17):
described it, and I hate to use this term as
a cliche, but he said today when we were up
he called it a war zone. They just the background here.
They have rescinded the five mile TFR to a three
mile and when we moved in just another two miles
is incredible. How much of the damage you could see
(10:42):
down there, and the massive amount of recovery operations that
are going down there, whether they're local law enforcement, whether
it's folks from the NTSB and the FAA. But there
is a massive operation still going on. They're probably not
so much firefighting but probably recovery at this.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Point, right And obviously this tragedy is horrific, and then
we have all of our equipment and all of our
resources naturally taking care of it, while the rest of
the city, you know, we're just we have our fingers crossed.
Nothing else goes sideways where we need. Some of these
first responders, God bless them. All they were on top
of this.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Thing was a stand. They deserve a pad on their back.
That was the other thing that we were reporting on
last night, that the massive response to this that just
you could see red lights from any direction of that
airport is agencies were responding, and then you could see
(11:47):
the blue lights from the police who were closing down
roads and directing traffic. The one thing that I kept
reporting on yesterday, just from all my years of doing this,
is I was pleading with folks not to come down
there and be a gawker, just based on the operation
that was going on. Sometimes it's hard for folks not
(12:08):
to want to go try to see this firsthand. But
the response was incredible last night, Terry. I know that's
kind of hard for folks to imagine unless they were watching,
you know, watching our video. But a lot of time
we were focused on the craft scene itself. So you
(12:30):
know we're going, we're getting ready to go back up
from the five to six thirty. If folks want to
get an idea of what it looks like today, tune
into WLKY at five o'clock will be about three miles
south and they'll be able to see the operations that
are taking place right now.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Last thing for you, I know you've looked at your
own video. We saw the engine. The NTSB did confirm
that was an engine from this ill fated UPS flight,
as aside the runway and then the tear in the
roof of what I think is a UPS like storage
cargo facility in that roof that was substantial, But the
(13:15):
aircraft continued onwards, so it must have still been in
some kind of a climb. And I guess we'll learn eventually,
but we'll be able to see that tonight, more of
that sort of what's happened to the buildings and get
a better idea of what these poor pilots were going
through trying to get this thing airborne.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, and you know, you bring up some good topics
you get caught up in the scene. I can remember
when we were flying down there something that caught my
eye that we really never shot video of. There was
a white, very faint, white plume of smoke that was
coming from the grassy area about three quarters of the
way down the runway. It caught my eye, and in hindsight,
(13:59):
I wish I had asked Goot to move the camera
over to try to shoot video of that, because the
area we're in now, we can't identify or we can't
find that engine that you're seeing in some of these
still pitchers, and I'm almost sure that that white plume
(14:19):
of smoke was coming from that engine. The one thing
we did get is Scott said, Bill, look at that
warehouse over there, look at the tear in the roof,
and I think what you're going to see on that
one is you were correct that plane was trying to fly.
That would have been the tail or the wheels that
caught that warehouse. And because it's the north end of
(14:43):
that warehouse or the area of the warehouse where the
plane would have gone over first has the damage, but
the south end of that warehouse has no damage, which
leads me to believe that that plane, as you'd indicated,
was flying at that point, just didn't have enough powering
to continue on with the.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Flight, didn't have the left maybe one end two both
went out and just left three operating. It's just a
horrible situation with the NTSB will sift through it and
let us know. Bill Dreamer, thank you so much for
your insights on this, and also give thanks to Scott Eckhart,
the photographer on board your Wlky helicopter last night taking
video scene around the world. I appreciate your time and
we'll watch for you on the five.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
All right, Thanks Terry, good talking with you.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
That is Bill Dreamer like we call him Chopper Bill
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