UNLV AD HAMRICK CAN RELATE TO AIRPLANE CRASH
UNLV athletic director Mike Hamrick was in his office Thursday when his executive assistant, Susie Smith, told him that he should turn on the television.
Hamrick watched news coverage of the US Airways flight that successfully landed in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, and he immediately flashed back to his own crash landing in 1995 while AD at East Carolina. He was returning to Greenville, N.C., on a single-engine Cessna when that engine suddenly went out.
"When the pilot said the plane was going down, there were five of us on the plane, and we didn’t know where we were going to land," Hamrick said. "We knew we were going down there somewhere."
That place turned out to be a soybean field 30 to 40 miles from Greenville. Hamrick was returning from Charlotte, N.C., where he signed a four-year football deal with North Carolina State, when the engine blew and the pilot glided the plane in.
It was a similar situation to the US Airways flight, which was scheduled to land in Charlotte, N.C., and had to glide into the Hudson shortly after takeoff from New York. Hamrick said he could relate to the passengers onboard as they hurried to get out of the sinking plane.
Airplane crashes are nothing new to the Hamricks, who attended Marshall. Hamrick played linebacker at the school beginning in 1976, six years after the plane carrying the football team crashed on its way back from a game at East Carolina, killing all 75 passengers, including 37 players. His wife, Soletta, grew up in Huntington, W.Va., and had friends who lost parents in that crash. One of her sorority sisters was the daughter of Marshall athletic director Charles E. Kautz, who died in that plane.
The Hamricks, because they have three children, seldom fly together. Their only trip together last year was the flight back from Phoenix after UNLV beat Arizona State in football.
"Once a year, at most, we fly together," Hamrick said.