There’s an aviation concept called “error chain,” which basically talks about how some crashes are caused by a single mistake. It’s the sequence of small, seemingly manageable decisions that weighs heavily after there’s no way out. But Dale Earnhardt Jr. didn’t need an NTSB report to understand that.

On August 15, 2019, Dale Jr., his wife Amy, their 15-month-old daughter Isla, the family dog, and two pilots were aboard a Cessna 680A Citation Latitude, heading to Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Tennessee. He was due at Bristol Motor Speedway that weekend as part of NBC Sports’ broadcast team. But the landing that followed destroyed the aircraft. And when Dale Jr. revisited it publicly on his Dale Jr. Download podcast, he didn’t reach for an excuse. He reached straight for accountability.

“And so yeah, I didn’t have my A guy in the captain’s chair, but that was never—shouldn’t have been—an issue. But I will say, like, it wasn’t his fault,” Dale Jr. opened up. “He didn’t; he didn’t do anything wrong. I put him in a bad spot. As an owner of that airplane, an operator of that airplane, I take full responsibility for putting him in a spot where he was heavy.”

And some of Dale Jr.’s decisions had been building towards that “heavy” moment.

He chose Elizabethton Municipal partly because it was cheaper than alternative airports, ignoring its 5,001-foot runway, which is on the shorter end for a jet of that class operating at near-maximum landing weight. Then, rather than refueling in stages across multiple legs, he boarded with a full fuel load, adding to the aircraft’s weight on final approach. Jr. also admitted that he would often take off and land without his seatbelt on, as did Amy and their daughter, Isla. During that landing, too, Isla had been sitting on Junior’s lap.

Individually, these things didn’t guarantee disaster, but together, in the hills of Bristol that particular day, they did.

Junior’s confession comes after the NTSB’s final report, released in September 2020, attributed it all to pilot error. The probable cause was the pilot’s decision to continue an unstabilized approach after the warning signs became apparent and the crew’s decision not to go around before touchdown. At 126 knots, the aircraft was closing in at almost 21 mph above the maximum recommended speed for the aircraft’s weight at that point, 108 knots.

Pilot Richard Pope later told investigators he was carrying extra speed because the plane “slows down so easy.” A Terrain Awareness and Warning System alert had already fired on approach. And Co-pilot Jeffrey Melton, who was also the director of operations for JRM Air’s flight department and the more experienced of the two, with 11,000 total flight hours, told investigators the approach was not stabilized.

The plane then bounced on its first touchdown. And again, on the second bounce, the crew tried to go around, but the thrust reversers were already deployed, and the attempt was useless. The flight manual of the aircraft explicitly states that speedbrakes must be deployed at touchdown before thrust reversers are engaged, a sequence that the pilot did not follow.

The fourth landing had the right main gear collapse. The plane dropped the outboard section of its right wing on the runway, tore through 400 feet of grass, down an embankment, through a creek, and into a chain-link fence before finally coming to rest on the edge of Tennessee Highway 91, about 600 feet past the end of the runway, already aflame.

“He had a short runway, and he had some tough terrain to get down and get down quick in the hills of Bristol, Tennessee. And those are all decisions that come from the top. And so we end up getting in there a little hot, and he’s trying to get down and get slowed down, and we bounce the plane — meaning instead of kind of coming in and touching down and then nose down, it came flat; it bounced.”

Inside the burning aircraft, Dale Jr. and pilot Melton tried to open the emergency exit above the wing first. It wouldn’t budge. Smoke was already coming from the lavatory. By the time Melton kicked open the main cabin door, fire was visible inside the bathroom. The opening he managed was described by the NTSB as roughly the size of a conventional oven — but it was enough. Everyone got out. Three passengers sustained minor injuries. The aircraft was destroyed.

“If it’s 300-foot ceilings, ah, we’ll be okay. And then you’re flying at night, and then you’re landing on a short runway, so you’ve got to be perfect. You have to get it right. You know, you’re doing three, four, or five things, making it more difficult and more challenging, and you’re messing with your odds. And so, I didn’t really realize I was taking advantage of the situation until we got ourselves in a spot that we couldn’t get out of,” Junior added.

Now, Junior has changed how he operates since: in interviews after the crash, he said he became directly involved in pre-flight decisions, scrutinizing weather, runway selection, and crew readiness in a way he never had before.

“I’m overly, extremely overly safe on some of those decisions to the point where it might be annoying to my pilots,” he admitted.

That change does not undo the night of August 15, 2019, but Junior surely understood that a racetrack wreck happens in an instant, and it happens in a system set up to take it. For a plane rolling off the end of a runway with your 15-month-old unbuckled in your lap? That is not the case.