Dale Earnhardt Jr Opens Up About Plane Crash, How It Changed Him | Bussin With The Boys #043

In fact, you received a recent accident bag, what was that in August of last year? Yeah, at some point, yeah, can you tell us a little bit about that and then can you also tell us how you guys probably sat back and reflected after seeing the Kobe news? and to think that you were in something that you know similar or something that could have been, you know, yeah, well, you know, uh, you know, I and where do I start, we were in a, uh, really, you know we were in a serious accident and , uh, very. scary, you know, I've flown my whole life and I think you know, I looked back and I flew, I rode King Air propeller

plane

s and Brazilian propeller

plane

s and whatever, I never questioned it, right?

I got on that, here we go. we're going somewhere I don't even care but I never questioned it I got on every plane I never looked at it and I went I don't want to get on that I thought it's good, we're good, I trust, I trust what's happening here, no matter what be it, and we fly as racing teams, we fly privately, uh, even on, you know, even the team planes are privately owned planes, we rarely fly commercially, etc. You know, all these years, you know, I took it for granted that I was, you know, putting my trust in all the people that you know were the mechanics of these airplanes or the pilots of these airplanes and, uh, the history of the airplane. itself, so I bought a new plane from Cessna, it's a really nice plane and we're flying and we've been flying for a while and we landed it at that airport before and it was a great clear day. and we kept flying there and I remember being a couple miles from the airport looking at the ground, everything is going the way it's supposed to go and uh we went down to land and we landed, we basically bounce when you land a plane.

Obviously I want to land the rear tires first and then put the tail down, put the nose down and when we landed, we landed like flats and a plane bounced in the air and when it first landed it closed all the shutters. And now we can't see, we just know that we're bouncing in the air and I don't know if we're 10 feet in the air or 150 feet in the air, but I know we have to get down to that runway. and it's not a really long runway and we don't have a lot of time to bounce around and time, you know, trying to get the plane to land, so we come down again just as hard, if not harder, and uh, it lands, it arrives. on the right side, it broke, again, you know, the blinds are closed, so you have no reference to what's happening outside, you don't know what, you don't know what's up and up, up or down, left and right. you're like in this tube moving and I realized the plane was tilted when we came down the second time and I thought in my mind that mechanically we were broken the gear on the left and right side and now you're on the wing and that dragon wing and that tail that dragon like it turned the plane the plane started to turn and in my mind again the mechanical and arrow racing pilot of mine starts to think now we are the plane turned the plane is turning with the wing, the left wing in the air and that's probably going to try to create some lift and get the plane up in the air and, you know, and do a flip on the plane so you know you're thinking you're going to be You're going to die, you know, you're thinking at that moment that this that's how it's going to happen and then you know in a lot of situations when you're running, for example, you're running. a car and it's dangerous and you're

crash

ing, you never think you never give up hope of getting out in one piece, so you know you never think about getting injured, but at any moment you try to put This on trying to articulate this, but you know you assume a risk.

You know when you're running at a guy and you're going to tackle him and you lined up at a really bad angle and you're going to hit him. this guy is very tough and he could hurt you, he could hurt him, but you're taking that risk, you assume you know, you know you're not going to die, you never think in your mind that you could die, but it could hurt. yourself and you could hurt it but you have to take, you know, you put yourself in that position, you do it with racing, you never do that with airplanes, so here we are and the airplane starts spinning and I'm thinking it's going to lift create and lift as it is positioned and ended up going off the runway, which broke the gear on the left side and caused the plant to reland the plane in a place where it was not going to create lift under it and then it became very difficult.

We went down into a kind of ravine area and when it hit it was extremely violent. We slid a little further and it stopped and I started yelling at Amy. The whole interior of the plane is no longer recognizable, panels are missing and things are loose and in different places everything moves and, you know, I just try, at that moment you think I'm broken and I have my my daughter island and I have to look at her and check on her and she's, you know, screaming and I'm thinking, God, please don't let anything bad happen to her, please don't let anything happen to my girl, right?

Look at her real quick and I said, "You know it, as far as I can tell in just a split second. You know she's going to be okay. I hand her to Amy. Amy is trying to get her bearings and I said, "Amy check she's fine. ".all you need to do now is look at her and check her legs, arms and check her head as you will know she has some kind of bruise on her head or she hit her head or anything I don't know so I gave her Amy that responsibility at that moment and then I, because I wanted to find a way out, I wanted to find out how I knew we had a hatch in the back, you know, we have the door, the plane is kind of tilted, I'm thinking no I don't know if we can open the front door because that way the plane is positioned we probably won't be able to open it, so I'm thinking about opening that back hatch, we're going to create an opportunity to get out, so I went back there and I'm seeing smoke coming out of the toilet and I saw a big smoke black, dark, I'm fine, I shouted towards the front, it was like we were on fire, we have to go, everyone needs the plant, the pilots are up there doing everything.

They are trying to do a number of things when they are in the situation. They have to fire the fire extinguishers. They have to turn this off. Turn them off. You know you can't climb. You can't leave the engines running and charging. so they're doing all the things as fast as they can to get everything to where the plane is as safe as possible under the circumstances that it's in, so they're there doing that right when, when I saw the smoke, I was like, come on man we're on fire we gotta move a little faster I couldn't open that hatch and I'm trying to open that hatch I can't open it that smoke is getting worse and worse.

We went over a chain link fence and it wrapped around that gate and didn't allow the gate to open like it needed to so we're trying to open it but it's not happening and I turned around. and I yelled at the other pilot and told him I couldn't open it so Amy yells at him and tells him to try the front door one more time because we had tried it and couldn't move it and he goes up the front door and turns the handle and he kicks it and it opened about two inches, I mean, two feet, so we went up the stairs, so the stairs now are going up the stairs when the floor, when the door

opens

, you know you go up the stairs, well, now we're walking we're going up the bottom of the stairs or uh to get out of the plane so the lead pilot is going to get out of the plane to build and then he gives me the baby so I go. up there to give her the baby now I get off the plane and I'm still a little bit I can't in all the time that all this is happening I'm still not 100 sure that Isla is okay during this whole process I still want, I still need more information about Isla, my little girl, you know, she's like dominating my thoughts and yet, you know, with my head injuries and the problems I've had with that, I'm thinking, man, she's not even.

She's two but she can't, I can't let her be dealing with things like that so anyway I just need to know that I need to see her well so I took a step to leave because he ran away. The pilot hit him and he ran away. I go out and tell him to come back. I have to see. Know. I have to check. Damn, he's running. I can barely walk. My back is broken from all over the hill. Then he left and then I turned around and I was helping Amy out and uh the damn grass was on fire underneath us, it was crazy, it was like in the movies and then we had to get our dog out and then our dog came out. second pilot and it was really, uh, I haven't talked about it or relived it in a long time, but it was very, very scary, you know? and then you're traveling to you didn't.

They put Amy in her own ambulance with Island and I'm alone in an ambulance and I still don't know if she was 100 years old and I'm really devastated, uh emotionally, the guy who was in the ambulance, um, did it. The best I've ever seen. He calls the other ambulance on her cell phone and he puts my wife on the phone and gives it to me so I can talk to her and I said, "You know, I was finally like Amy, you got a chance to really look." on island and take, you know, look what's going on with her, okay and you know, I finally had some relief because that was very stressful, um and you know, Amy, I've been in racing car accidents, uh, flips. , really. bad things caught fire, I did all kinds of crazy things in race cars, so when you

crash

a car, even if it's really bad, the first thought you really have is: well, we have another car in the truck because we took two to the track racing, it's a backup. car is what they call it I wonder how good that backup car is is it as good as the one I just crashed that's your first thought you don't think about damn it was a near death experience you don't even think about things so you just think, well, I have to get back on the track, like, how good is the other car, come on, you know, load that load to hit one, we'll take out the other one, let's go and um, so I was. experienced and when it happened I came out you know everything that happened as soon as I knew everyone was fine and everyone was healthy I went in well what is this?

You already know what the next step is. What do we have to do? There has to be some rules, regulations, steps that we have to take, uh, yeah, the financial aspect, you know, the consequences or whatever, you know, I'm starting to get into that mode, you know, and uh, and man, really within a week I was back on a plane or even sooner. Back on a plane flying now a little more nervous about landings and stuff, but I got back to it um, Amy on the other hand had a harder time with it, that was completely destroyed or upset for her and she still has a hard time feeling today. comfortable to fly.

Now I admit that I can't put my daughter on a plane right now. It's not us yet. She, she, she remembers what happened when we took her on planes. She now she has a reaction when we take off. Turbulence hit when we landed, she didn't know it, but now she has reactions, she remembers something from that day and now as she gets older, 5, 10, 20, 40 years old, she won't remember what happened to her when she was less than two years old. . but for now she knows it, so I don't like taking her own planes from her. I don't like subjecting her to that stress.

I feel selfish because I take her where I want to go. She has no idea where we are going. um, I have no idea, it's not her desire to get on this plane and go wherever she wants us to go 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. . get out, so that's the hard part for me, otherwise, I'm comfortable, I already got another plane, I'm back, I still kept one of my pilots from that incident and I'm back in the air, I'm back, uh we went to uh we went to therapy I believe in therapy you know, I believe in talking to someone you have problems we all have things that we have to deal with I have things from my childhood that I still need to work on and I probably don't put them in Enough time had passed, but we went straight to a therapist to say, Hey, is there anything you can do?

We're ready to work, so Amy and I did some work there, which helped us. She continues to work with some. with some people to help her understand how to fly comfortably and fly again, you know, regularly, but she's way behind her, you know me, she's probably where anyone else would be, given the situation.