The captain texted his wife “I love you” before the plane crashed in a giant fireball. Now She Shares Her Love and Heartache (Exclusive)

HE NEEDS TO KNOW

• More than a month after Capt. Dana Diamond died in a UPS cargo plane crash in Louisville, Ky., his widow is recalling their last moments together.

• Diamond worked at UPS for 37 years as a pilot and previously served as commissioner and fire chief of his local fire department in Texas.

• A few minutes before the fatal accident, he sent a message to his wife

The night before a UPS cargo plane crashed, fire and destruction rained down on an area of ​​Louisville, Ky. – killing 14 – Capt. Dana Diamond planted flowers with his wife, Donna, to encourage more butterflies to fly around their 132-acre farm in Caldwell, Texas.

“We’ve done well. We’ve made a nice home,” Dana, 62, told his wife before leaving to serve as an international relief officer on a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 jet bound for Hawaii on Tuesday, Nov. 4.

“We have so much to do,” Dana said.

The Diamonds had spent much of October together making improvements to the property their home had been built on only a year and a half before. That Monday, November 3, they toured the grounds before Donna’s sister, Carol, arrived.

At the end of Carol’s visit, she got up to leave, hugging and kissing Dana.

“I worry about you, Dana, in those old planes,” Carol told her brother-in-law, Donna recalled in an interview with PEOPLE, her first since her husband’s death. “I hate it when you fly. I’m worried something is going to happen.”

The longtime pilot quickly reassured Carol. “I’m just going to go in the back this time,” Dana said, according to his wife. “I’ll be the ‘chef.’ “

“I’ll be home before you miss me,” he told them both.

The following afternoon, UPS Flight 2976 was taking off at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport when its left engine and pylon separated from the wing as a fire broke out.

The plane careened back toward the ground and crashed in a massive explosion, killing Dana, the two other crew members on board — Captain Richard Wartenberg, 57, and First Officer Lee Truitt, 45 — and 11 bystanders, PEOPLE previously reported.

Donna was widowed for the second time in her life.

“I’ve done this before,” says the 63-year-old whose previous husband, Johnny, died unexpectedly in 2015. (She also has two children with her first husband, whom she divorced before marrying Johnny.)

“I didn’t think I could ever love like I did before, but Dana is the one,” Donna says.

For decades, Dana focused on her career and giving back to her hometown of Bastrop, Texas. He joined UPS in 1988 and rose through the ranks with Lee Collins, a fellow pilot.

For several years Dana was Collins’ deputy in the Independent Pilots Association (IPA), and together they became known as the “Batman and Robin” of the union.

“You never wanted to have any of us in a meeting because you might be in over your head,” says Collins, 65, who worked at UPS for 31 years before becoming CEO of the National Flight Training Alliance. “We were a formidable team”

Dana was also Commissioner and Chief of District No. 1 of Bastrop County Emergency Services, and later trained air rescue firefighters — some of whom were the first to arrive on the scene in Louisville.

“He was a champion of safety,” says Capt. Jess Grigg, who brought Dana on when he was chairman of the IPA’s Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting (ARFF) committee. Jack Kreckie, a retired deputy fire chief who oversaw ARFF services at Boston Logan International Airport, says the training he received from Dana was “some of the best aircraft training that many of us have received.” In total, Dana has helped train over 1,000 firefighters in that specialty.

When Dana met Donna in 2015, their worlds quickly expanded.

“I was lost and broken, I tell you,” Donna says. “Then I met Dana and he filled everything in me.”

She went on a date with Dana in 2010 – her first and last with him: they married within months. October marked their 10th anniversary.

“We were inseparable,” Donna says of the big days of their marriage. Dana quickly became known as “Papaw” to their seven grandchildren.

“I loved that my dream was his dream,” she adds.

Together, the couple built their dream estate. In between long stints at home in Caldwell, Dana continued to travel the world for work, leaving sweet notes that Donna finds in his absence.

As of October, the pilot had spent nearly 25 years flying the MD-11 and was the most senior pilot in that type of fleet for UPS. In his last conversation with Collins in August, Dana talked about his plans to retire in 2026.

Donna is still struggling with the bitter irony that her husband decided to bid on the trip to Hawaii, which was supposed to be quick.

That Tuesday, Dana texted his 8-year-old granddaughter, Hayden, who shared her Christmas list and a sweet note: “I love you, Papaw.” Donna also communicated with Dana several times that day. The mandate of the day changed when she checked on one of their cows. Her son, Will, called to ask if she had heard about a UPS plane crash in Louisville. Did she know what kind of plane Dana was scheduled to be on?

Rushing home, Donna found Will waiting for her and watched the news despite his protests. Her nightmare was soon confirmed: Dana’s plane had crashed.

“Oh my God, he is,” Donna remembers saying. “I ended up on the floor, just screaming.”

It wasn’t until later that day—as she and her family navigated the tsunami of grief and shock—that Donna read one of the last messages Dana had sent her, minutes before the accident: “I love you, wife.”

In the following weeks, the local community and people across the nation mourned collectively. Unanswered questions also remain as the NTSB continues its lengthy investigation.

Collins describes the crash as “the perfect storm of events.”

He says that if the plane had just lost an engine, “that plane would have flown just fine.” “But losing an engine, catching fire on that wing where the engine left and then contaminating … the number two engine and causing the compressor to lock up and then roll back,” Collins continues. “You can’t really imagine that scenario.”

He adds: “There was nothing to save them after the second engine stopped.”

As he awaits the NTSB report, Collins says he’s alarmed by a change in statistics. For years during his tenure at UPS, the company had no fatal accidents, but in the past 15 years, that has changed, he says.

“There were three crashes, all fatal, seven crew members killed and 11 people on the ground,” Collins says, referring to the three fatal UPS plane crashes that have occurred since 2010, as reported USA Today.

As he mourns his friend and former colleague, Collins says the best way to honor Dana is to train pilots with a focus on safety — a priority Dana fought for every day.

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“Dana was a tremendous person and captain in that she believed in doing things one way and that was the right way, the safe way,” says Collins. “There were no shortcuts. There were no excuses because we all know our world can have deadly consequences. The goal is to prevent that from ever happening again.”

Sharing Dana’s impact on the aviation community is important to Donna, even as she holds close memories of him.

“Dear wife, I love you,” Dana wrote months ago in a note she left for Donna to find, hoping it would ease the pain of his absence. “You are the best part of me.”

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