Dale Earnhardt Jr. Recalls Horrific 2019 Plane Crash With His Family, & How No NASCAR Wreck Can Prepare You For It

This is easily one of my biggest fears, so props to Dale Earnhardt Jr. for how he handled this horrific situation.

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 a my, 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…

Experiencing The Crash From Inside The Plane

During an episode of the Bussin’ With the Boys podcast about five years ago, Jr. recounted the details of the accident and what happened in-detail.

He is no stranger to flying, and pretty much every professional race team flies private all the time, so he never thought much of it… flying was part of his weekly work schedule:

“It was a great day, clear day we’re flying on in there, and I remember being a couple miles from the airport looking down at the ground. Everything is going just like it’s supposed to go. And we came down to land and we landed, we bounced, basically. When you land a plane, you kind of wanna land the rear tires first, obviously, and then bring the nose down. And when we landed, we landed sort of flat and the plane bounced back up in the air.

When it landed the first time, it shut all the blinds and so now we can’t see out, we just know we bounced up in the air. And I don’t know if we’re 10 feet in air, 150 feet in the air, but I know we got to get down on that runway and it’s not a really long runway, and we don’t have a lot of time to be bouncing and taking up time trying to get the plane on the ground. So we came down again just as hard if not harder. And the landing on the right side broke again. The blinds are shut, so you’ve got no reference of what’s going on outside.

You don’t know what’s up and up and down, or left and right, you ‘re just kind of in his tube moving. And so I could tell the plane was tilted when we came down the same time, and I thought in my mind, mechanically, we’re broken on the right side gear and now we’re on the wing. And that wing dragging and that stuff dragging sort of turned the plane. In my mind again, the mechanical and aero race car driver mind starts thinking, now the plane’s turning with the wing up in the air. That’s probably gonna try to create some lift and bring the plane up in the air and cartwheel the plane.”

Of course, like anyone probably would in that situation, Jr. thought they were all going to die:

“You know, you’re thinking you’re gonna die. You’re thinking in that moment that this is this is how it’s gonna happen. And so in a lot of situations, when you’re in a race, for example, you race in a car and it’s dangerous, and you’re crashing, you never think, ever… you never give up hope that you’re gonna get out in one piece. You never think about getting injured at any time. I’m trying to articulate this, but you know, you assume risk.

You know when you when you’re running at a guy and you’re gonna tackle him and you lined up for a really bad angle, and you’re gonna hit this guy really hard and it might hurt you and it might hurt him, but you’re taking that risk, you assume, you know it. You know you’re not gonna die, you don’t ever think in your mind you could die, but you might hurt yourself and you might hurt him, but you put yourself in that position. You do that with racing.

You never do that with airplanes. So here we are, and the plane starts to turn, and I’m thinking it’s gonna lift… it ended up going off the runway, which broke the left side gear and got the plane back on the ground to where it wasn’t gonna create lift underneath it. And then it got really rough. We went down into sort of a ditch, ravine area and when it hit that, that was extremely violent and we slid a little bit further and it came to a stop.”

The Aftermath And Getting Out Of The Plane

One the plane came to a stop, Jr. was calling for his wife Amy, and he looked around to realize that the plane looked completely different. Things have been knocked out of place, panels are missing, and he eventually noticed smoke coming out of the toilet, which had to have been extremely scary.

Of course, Jr. was most worried about his little girl, Isla, and making sure she was not hurt during the crash:

“I started hollering for Amy, the whole interior of the plane doesn’t isn’t recognizable anymore. Panels and things are missing, loose and in different places. Everything‘s moved, and you know, in that moment. you just sort of think, am I broken? and I got my daughter Isla, and I got I gotta look at her and check her, and she’s screaming, and I’m thinking God please don’t let nothing be wrong with her. Please don’t let nothing be wrong with my girl, right? And so I look at her real quick, and I said, you know, as far as I can tell just a split second I know she’s gonna be okay.

I handed her to Amy, Amy’s trying to get her bearings, and I was like ‘Amy, check Isla really good. That’s all you need to do right now is look at her and check her legs, arms and check her head. Does she have any kind of bruise on her head or anything?’ I don’t know. And so I gave Amy that responsibility in that moment, because I wanted to find a way out. I wanted to figure out, I knew we had to hatch back. We’ve got the door, the planes kinda leaned over, I’m thinking, I don’t know if we can open the front door because that way the plane is positioned, probably not gonna be able to get it open.

So I’m thinking, get that hatch in the back open, let’s create opportunity to leave. So I went back there and I’m seeing smoke coming out the toilet, and saw black dark thick smoke. I hollered up to the front, I was like, ‘We’re on fire. We gotta go.’ The pilots are up there doing all the, they’re trained to do a series of things when they’re in the situation, they gotta fire off extinguishers, they gotta shut this down. You can’t you can’t leave motors running and carrying on. So they’re doing everything as fast as they can to get everything to where the plane is as safe as possible.”

He couldn’t get the hatch open, but it the smoke was getting worse, and Amy told them to try the front door one more time, and the pilot was able to kick it open.

But instead of walking down the stairs, they were now climbing up because of how everything got flipped around:

“I couldn’t get that hatch open. I’m trying like hell to get that hatch open, the smoke is getting worse worse. We went through a chain-link fence and it wrapped around that door and wouldn’t allow the door to open the way I needed it to. So we’re trying to get that open and it ain’t happening, and I turn back and holler at the other pilot, I said,’ I can’t get it open.’ So Amy hollers at him and and says, ‘Try the front door one more time,’ because we had tried it and couldn’t get it to move.

And he goes up there to the front door, and turns the handle, kicks it, it popped open 2 feet and so we climbed up the stairs. The stairs, when the door opens up, you walk up the stairs. Now we’re, climbing up the bottom of the stairs to get out the plane. and so the lead pilot goes to get out the plane, and then he’s like, hand me the baby. So I go up there to hand him the baby, now I get out of the plane. and I’m still a bit, I can’t .. the entire time all this is going on, I still am not 100% sure that is Isla is okay. During this whole process, I still need more information about Isla, my little girl, It’s like dominating my thoughts.”

Jr. has had multiple concussions and head injuries, and so he was also concerned that his daughter had sustained some sort of concussion or injury of that nature. He handed Isla to the pilot to take her out of the plane, and he took off running with her, I’m assuming to get her medical care. Jr. said the grass was on fire when they stepped out like a scene out of a movie.

They all left in ambulances, but once Jr. figured out his daughter was okay, he obviously felt much better about the situation in terms of everyone being healthy:

“I’m helping Amy get out and the damn grass is on fire underneath us. It was crazy as hell. It was like in the movies. And then we had to pull our dog out, and then our second pilot came out. It was just a really, I haven’t talked about or relived it in a while, but it was very very scary. They put Amy in her own ambulance with Isla, and then I’m in an ambulance by myself and I still don’t know if Isla is 100%, and I’m I’m really tore up emotionally.

The guy riding an ambulance did the coolest thing ever. He calls the other ambulance on his cell phone and put my wife on the phone and gives it to me so I can talk to her. Finally, I was like Amy, did you got a chance to really look at Isla and see what’s going on with her? Is she okay? So I kind of finally got some relief, because that was so stressful. “

Of course, Jr. has been tons of crazy crashes during his racing career, and so he has a different mindset about these types of things. He recalled thinking that once everyone was okay, he was in business mode trying to figure out what the needed to do in terms of reporting things and following regulations and rules for a plane crash like that. For Amy, though, Jr. called it a “completely life shattering for Amy,” and I can completely understand why because I think I’d have a hard time getting back on a plane after something like that too.

Moving On And Flying Again

Following this crash, Jr. said he flew about a week later, but he couldn’t’ put his daughter back on a plane because her attitude about it completely changed, understandably, obviously, and he felt selfish for putting her through that stress again:

“She remembers it happening when we take her own planes now, she has a reaction when we take off, when we hit turbulence, when we land. She used to not, you know, but now she has a reaction. She remembers something about that day. And now she gets older 5, 10, 20, 40 years old, she’s not gonna remember what happened to her when she was younger than two years old, but for now, she does. So I don’t like taking her own planes, I don’t like putting her through that stress. I feel selfish because I’m taking her where I wanna go.

She has no idea where we’re going, it’s not her wish to get on this plane and go to wherever we’re going, our destination, and I feel selfish for doing it. So I don’t like putting her on planes because she doesn’t enjoy it and it stresses her out. So that’s the hard part for me, otherwise, I’m comfortable. I’ve already gotten another plane. I still kept one of my pilots from that from that incident, and I’m back in the air. I’m back going. We went to we went to therapy. I believe in therapy, I believe talking to somebody, you got problems, that  stuff we’ve got to deal with.

We all got stuff…  I got stuff from my childhood that I still need to work on and probably don’t put enough time in. But we went right to a therapist to say hey is there anything you can do? We’re ready to work. So me and Amy did a little bit of work there, Which helped us. She continues to do some work with some folks to help her understand how to comfortably fly and get back and flying on a regular basis. but she’s way behind me she’s probably where anybody else would be given the situation.”

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, so hopefully Isla has forgotten it all and 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.

It sounds like Jr. handled it almost as perfectly as possible, and it’s a pretty harrowing you can listen to below.

The post Dale Earnhardt Jr. Recalls Horrific 2019 Plane Crash With His Family, & How No NASCAR Wreck Can Prepare You For It first appeared on Whiskey Riff.