Truly nightmare experience for Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his family.
Back on August 15, 2019, the popular NASCAR driver and his family survived the crash of a Cessna Citation Latitude jet, which was reported to have been caused by bad pilot decisions. Both crew members “had hundreds of hours of flight experience in this aircraft model,” and the copilot was also the director of operations for the airplane operator. Even though they had so much experience, the crew decided to “continue the approach after realizing the aircraft was in an unstabilized approach.”
The aircraft landed too fast, was not configured properly for landing, and bounced several times before one of the main landing gear collapsed. The plane went off the runway, came to rest just outside the airport, and caught fire.
It was headline news at the time, Dale Jr. his wife Amy, and his young daughter Isla (who was under two at the time) were on the way to Bristol Motor Speedway for the weekend races, as Jr. was scheduled to be part of the NBC broadcast team for the Saturday night race. The crash happened at Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and the footage from the incident is still jarring to see.
Truly, this is the stuff of nightmares…
He talked about how he had taken certain shortcuts, so to speak, and during an interview with Hank Parker, his dads longtime friend, this week, Jr. took responsibility for everything that happened, saying he made a lot of decisions as the plane owner that were wrong:
“It was gonna take Amy to Texas after dropping me off in Bristol. There’s a perfectly fine airport in Bristol with a long runway, but we decided to go to this other one because it was a little cheaper to get into, shorter runway down in the valley closer to the racetrack, all the silly things that I should’ve never considered or worried about.
And at this particular flight, which is common for our guys, they’re rated for their plane to be able to fly and they’ll swap seats, they’ll swap legs. So my a pilot will fly, and then the B pilot will fly as a captain, and that’s common if you guys are rated properly for that. So yeah, I didn’t have my A guy in the captains chair, but that never should’ve been an issue.
But I will say, he didn’t he didn’t do anything wrong. I put him in a bad spot as an owner of that airplane and operator that airplane. I take full responsibility for putting him in a spot where he was heavy, he had a short runway, and he had some tough terrain to get down and get down quick and the hills of Bristol, Tennessee, and I just know those are all decisions that come from the top.”
It’s pretty impressive that he has taken ownership of all of that and doesn’t place the blame on anyone else, and I think that goes to show a lot about his character. Jr. continued, saying they came into the landing hot, which is how this all started. Jr. also admitted that he had gotten so comfortable over the years that he would take off and land without his seatbelt on, as did Amy and their daughter Isla.
During this flight, Isla had been sitting on Amy’s lap, but she was fussy so, Jr. took her, and as they came into land, the plane bounced off the runway, went 40 feet up, and the second bounce broke landing gear on the right side and damaged the censor. They went back up in the air, and were running out of runway because this was a smaller airport. When they tried to go back up, the plane wouldn’t let the motors go back up because of the broken landing gear, so they just idling in place.
When they hit the ground again, it hit so hard all of the blinds shut on their own, and because Jr. is no stranger to crashes from his racing career, he could feel everything that was happening and where it was going, even if they couldn’t see it.
The wing was dragging on the ground at this point, causing the plane to turn, and Jr. was afraid it would flip and they were full of fuel. Eventually, they went off the runway, and there was a creek nearby with banking of about six feet. They skipped across that, and hit the other side, and Jr. and Isla went flying into the wall in front of them, and he turned his full body so he would take the hit, and Jr. put it simply:
“Bruised from my shoulder to my a**.”
They eventually slid to a stop, and Amy was laying on the floor. She was fine, but obviously they were most concerned about Isla, who was about two at the time. Thankfully, she was totally fine, other than a nasty rug burn from how hard she slid when they were crashing, and Jr. says there was black smoke coming out of toilet, and he couldn’t get the back door open. He went up to check on the pilots, and they were just working like crazy to cut off all the switches and turn off what they needed to.
Eventually, his B pilot came back, and he couldn’t get the door open either, because there was a chain link fence they went through at some point that had wrapped around the plane to the point that they couldn’t open the door. Neither door would open, but eventually Amy told them to try one of them again, and it worked.
Of course, they were all in shock:
“We’re all in a bit of shock. I’m still, my mind is dominated by, ‘Is Isla hurt?’ Because we don’t know whether she’s got a broken arm, whether she got a head injury or nothing. We don’t know nothing. And it’s dominating my mind that I have gotten this little girl hurt in this plane. And as soon as I handed her to him, I wanted to get out of the plane and him give her right back to me.
But he took off running away from the plane, because the whole ground was on fire. And so I got out of the plane and I took about five steps toward him to chase him down, because I wasn’t mad at him, but I was getting angry. Like, I wanted my kid, and I turned around and got Amy out, next pilot, we got the dog out, we had Gus with us. And we got everybody out. I was the last one standing at the plane, and I looked down at the ground, and it was like a carpet of fire. The back of the plane was really lit up, and I took five steps and that pain in my back from hitting that wall hit me, and I went to the ground.
And the next thing i know, there’s about five or six people on top of me trying to help me and get me in the ambulance. I mean, I was running on adrenaline, hadn’t felt a thing and as soon as everybody was out and I started to move from that plane, all of a sudden it felt like somebody had shot me with v gun in my back… I couldn’t move.”
Jr. got in an ambulance, but he didn’t know where Amy and Isla were, and he asked the paramedic about his daughter. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but he knew the medic in the other ambulance, and he called and let Jr. talk to Amy, where he learned that Isla was totally fine.
A traumatic experience for any parent, I’m sure, and Jr. says he now he always thinks about how his daughters (he had another one, Nicole, in 2020) don’t have a choice when they take them on a plane. He often thinks twice about if he’s being selfish by doing so, which I think is a totally normal response when you’ve been through something like they have.
Following this crash, Jr. met with his dads pilot, Joey, who flew him for years, because he wanted to figure out how to prevent it from ever happening again in terms of what he could control. He learned that there were a handful of things he did wrong before they even took off, and now they have a totally different approach:
“We made a lot of mistakes and got careless, and got lucky that day. I sat down with a pilot that I knew, Joey , who flew with my dad forever. And I sat down with Joey, and I said, Joey, help me figure this out. I’ve got to work, I’ve got to get back in a plane, I’ve gotta fly.’
And he’s like, ‘Man, y’all, there were three or four things you did before you ever got on that plane, that if you didn’t do, your odds are hundreds of times better. You’ve got to set some protocols in place, and you can’t ever cross that line.’ And so we really did. I knew I was gonna fly again, I knew I was gonna own another airplane.”
He says there are things now he simply won’t do in a plane, even if it seems overboard, because he’s at a place in his career where he can say he’s just not going to make it because they couldn’t take off. I think it’s smart, especially because he has the power to do that as an owner, and thankfully, no one on that plane was seriously injured, or worse, and they all lived to tell about it. The fact that Jr. takes responsibility for a lot of his bad decisions that led up this moment is just beyond impressive.
I think this is the biggest fear most people have when flying, obviously, and the fact that Jr. was on the plane with his whole family makes it all that much scarier. This was half a decade ago now, and luckily Isla was too young to remember it, but hopefully Amy is able to fly as comfortably as possible now… I’m sure that day will always be in the back of their minds, it’s an extremely traumatic experience, and I personally don’t know if I could do it again, especially as much as they fly.
