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

you actually gotten a uh recent crash bag what was that in august last year yeah sometime yeah can you can you tell us about that a little bit and then can you also tell us probably how you guys probably sat back and reflected after seeing the kobe news and thinking you were in something you know similar or something that could have been you know yeah well you know the uh you know i and where do i even start the we were in a uh really you know we were in a bad accident and uh very scary um you know we i've flown all my life and i think you know i look back and i flew i rode in king air prop planes and brazilians prop planes and just anything i never questioned it right i got on it here here we go we're going somewhere i don't even i don't even care but i'm i never questioned it i got on every plane with ever i never looked at it and went i don't want to get on that i figured it it's good we're good i trust i trust what's happening here no matter what it was and we fly as race teams we we fly private uh even on you know even the team planes are privately owned aircraft we rarely ever ever flew commercial and so um you know for all these years you know i just took it for granted that i was you know putting my trust in all the people that either you know were the mechanics on these planes or the pilots on these planes and and uh the history of the plane itself so i got a brand new plane from cessna it's a really nice plane and i'm we're flying and we've been flying in a while and we've landed it into that airport before and it was a great day clear day and we're flying on in there and i remember being a couple miles from the airport looking down the ground everything's going just like it's supposed to go and uh we came down in to land and we landed we bounced basically when you land a plane you kind of want to land the rear tires first obviously and then then bring the tail bring the nose down and when we landed we landed sort of flat and a plane bounced back up in the air and 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 there or 150 feet in the air right 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 you know taking up time trying to get the plane on the ground so we came down again just as hard if not harder and uh the landing get on the right side broke uh again you know the the uh the the blinds are shut so you got no reference of what's going on outside you don't know what's you don't know what's up and up up or down left and right you're just kind of in this tube moving and so i could tell the plane was tilted when we came down the second time and i thought in my mind i'm like mechanically we're broken the left the right side gear and now we're on the wing and that wing dragon and that tail that stuff dragon sort of turned the plane started to turn the plane and in my mind again the mechanical and arrow race car driver mine starts thinking now we're the plane's turned the plane's turning with the wing the left wing up in the air and that's that's probably going to try to create some lift and bring the plane up in the air and uh you know and and cartwheel the plane so you know you're thinking you're gonna be you're you're gonna die you know you're thinking in that moment that that this is this is how it's gonna happen and so you're you know in a lot of situations when you're race for example you're racing a car and it's dangerous and you're crashing you never think ever that you never give up hope that you're going to get out in one piece so you're going to you know you never think about getting injured but anytime trying to put this in trying to articulate this but you know you assume risk you you know when you when you're running at a guy and you're going to tackle him and you you lined up for a really bad angle and you're going to hit this guy really hard and it might hurt you it might hurt him but you're taking that risk you assume that 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 gotta take you know you put yourself in that position you do that with racing you never do that with airplanes and so here we are and the plane starts to starts to turn and i'm thinking it's going to lift create and lift like like the way it's positioned and it um ended up uh going off the runway which broke the left side gear and uh got the plant got the plane back on the ground to where it wasn't gonna create lift underneath it and um then it got really rough we had we we went down into sort of a ditch ravine area and when it hit that that was extremely violent um and we slid a little bit further and it came to stop and uh i started hollering for amy um the whole interior of the plane doesn't isn't recognizable anymore panels and things are are missing and loose and in different places everything's moved and uh you know just trying to in that moment you just sort of think am i broken and and i got my daughter isla and i got i got to look at her and check her and she's you know 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 in just a split second i you know she's gonna be okay i hand her to amy amy's trying to get her bearings and i was like amy check isla really good just that's all you need to do right now is is look at her and check her legs arms and check her head as she gonna you know she got any kind of bruise on her head or hit her head or anything i don't know and so i gave amy that responsibility in that moment and then i because i wanted to find a way out i wanted to figure out how i i knew we had a hatch in the back you know we got the door the plane's kind of leaned over i'm thinking i don't know if we can open the front door because that way the plane's positioned probably not gonna be able to get that open so i'm thinking get that hatch in the back open let's create an opportunity to leave so i went back there and i'm seeing smoke coming out the toilet and saw black dark big smoke i'm like all right i hollered up to the front i was like we're on fire we got to go you all need the plant the pilots are up there doing all the they're trying to do a series of things when they're in the situation they got to fire off the extinguishers they got to shut this down turn them you know they you can't climb you can't leave motors running and carrying on so they're doing all the things as fast as they can to get everything to where the plane is as safe as possible in the circumstances it's in so they're up there doing that right when when uh when i saw the smoke i was like yo come on man we're on fire we gotta gotta move a little faster i couldn't get that hatch open and uh i'm trying to like get that hatch open i can't get it open that smoke's getting worse and worse we'd we went through a chain link fence and it wrapped around that door and it wouldn't allow the door to open the way i needed it to so we're trying to get that open it ain't happening and i turned back and i hollered at the other pilot and i said i can't get it open so amy hollers at him and says try the front door one more time because we had tried it and couldn't get it to move and it goes up through the front door and turns the handle and kicks it and it popped open about two inches i mean uh two feet and so we climbed up the stairs so the stairs are now up the stairs when the plant when the door opens up you know you walk up the stairs well now we're walking we're climbing up the bottom of the stairs or uh to get out of the plane and so the lead pilot goes to get out of the plane to build then 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 i can't in the entire time all this is going on i still am not 100 sure that isla is okay um during this whole process i'm still wanting i still need more information about isla my little girl you know it's like dominating my thoughts and um i still i you know with my head injuries and the issues that i've had with that i'm thinking man she's not even two years old yet she can't i can't have her uh dealing with stuff like that and so anyways i'm just i need to know i need to see her right and so i took a step to go because he took off running the pilot i gave him out and he takes off running i come out and i'm like come back i gotta see you know i gotta check out damn he's running i can hardly walk my back is tore all the hill um and i could hardly move and so he took off and so i turned around and i'm helping amy get out and uh the damn grass was on fire underneath us it was crazy as hell it was like in the movies and then our we had to pull our dog out and then our our second pilot come out and it was just a really uh i haven't talked about it or relived it uh in a long in a while but uh it was very very scary you know and then you're riding to didn't they they put amy in her own ambulance with island and i'm in an ambulance by myself and i still don't know if i was 100 and i'm i'm really tore up uh emotionally the guy riding in the ambulance um did the coolest thing ever um he calls the other ambulance on his cell phone and puts my wife on the phone and gives it to me and so i can talk to her and i said you know finally i was like amy you got a chance to really look at isla and take take you know see what's going on with her is she okay and you know so i kind of finally got some relief of because that was so stressful um and you know amy i've been in race car crashes uh flips just really bad stuff caught on fire um done all kinds of crazy stuff in race cars so when you crash a car even really badly the first thought that you really have is well we got another car in the hauler because we take two to the racetrack it's a backup car it's 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 that was a close near-death experience you don't never even think about stuff like that you just think well i gotta get back on the track how do how good does the other car let's go you know load that load load to crash one up we'll get the other one out let's go and um so i was seasoned and when it happened i got out you know all that happened as soon as i knew everybody was okay and everybody was healthy i went into okay what's this uh you know how what what's the next move what do we need to do there's got to be some rules regulations steps we need to take uh yeah the financial asp you know fallout or whatever you know i'm starting to go into that mode you know and uh and and man i really in a week was back on a plane or even sooner was back on a plane flying now a little bit more nervous about landings and so forth but i got right back to it um amy on the other hand had a harder time with it she that was like completely life-shattering or altering for her and she still struggles today with getting comfortable to fly now i admit i cannot put my daughter on a plane right now i still ain't us she she she she remembers it happening when we take her on 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 reactions she remembers something about that day and now as 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 you know 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 want to go she has no idea where we're going um no idea 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'm back i still kept one of my pilots from that from that incident and i'm back in the air i'm back going uh we went to uh we went to therapy i believe in therapy you know i believe in talking to somebody you got problems we all got stuff we got to deal with i got stuff from my childhood that i still need work on and probably don't put enough time in but so we went right to a therapist to say hey is there anything you can do we're ready to to work so me and amy did a little bit of work there uh which helped us she continues to do some work with some with some with some folks to to help her understand how to comfortably fly and get back in you know in in the flying on a regular basis uh but she's way behind you know me she's probably where anybody else would be uh given the situation

Channel: Bussin' With The Boys

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Keywords: bussin with the boys, will compton, taylor lewan, nashville, tennessee titans, nfl podcast, sports podcast, nashville podcast, nashville tennessee, music city, for the boys, barstool sports, pardon my take, tfatk, the fighter and the kid, congratulations podcast, king and the sting, spittin chiclets

Id: WC0cBmRiCQU

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020