After Michigan basketball players breathed a sigh of relief after their initial plane taking off for Washington D.C. this week was forced to abort its takeoff and skid off the runway, players acted quickly to updating their family and friends about what had just transpired. Among those sending out updates was Andrew Dakich, the son of ESPN analyst Dan Dakich.
Dakich received the update just about an hour before he was to begin broadcasting for ESPN, which obviously took him a little off course in a state of panic. He expanded on his thoughts to Land of 10.
“My son sent me a text that said, ‘We’ve been in a plane crash’ in a group to my ex-wife, myself and my daughter,” Dan Dakich told Land of 10 on Thursday before Michigan played Illinois at Verizon Center. “I was like, ‘Holy (expletive),’ right? Then, two minutes later, I got another text that was just, ‘Oh my gosh.’ After that I just kept calling him and got a hold of him and found out everyone was OK.”
That has to be incredibly scary and unnerving in the heat of the moment. And maybe Andrew should have provided one extra detail or two in his initial text message to calm the nerves a little bit. But we can give the Michigan player a pass given the circumstances and panic he must have been going through at the time.
“I don’t think any of us understood the magnitude of it, and then pictures started to surface and it was like, ‘That could have gone bad a thousand different ways.’ We just kept communicating with him throughout the day.”
But let’s talk about the pilot of this plane. Everyone on the plane was safe once the plane came to a stop, which is fantastic. It could have been so much worse, according to witness observations shared by MLive.com;
The landing gear collapsed and the plane went through a fence and, as one descriptor said, “the pilot opted to veer to the side instead of going toward buildings.”
There was a ravine ahead. The plane stopped just short of it. There was a jolt. Those on the plane described waiting for the plane to stop; “it felt like forever,” Michigan strength and conditioning coach Jon Sanderson said.
Yikes.
[Land of 10, MLive]
