Butler Team Plane Loses Cabin Pressure, Scares Hell Out of Coaches and Players On-Board

The Butler Bulldogs basketball team had quite the scare after the plane they were in lost cabin pressure on Thursday night.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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The charter flight that the Butler basketball team took back to *shudders* Indiana following the team's Thursday night loss in New York to St. John's had a helluva scare after some of the team and coaches thought the plane was going to crash and they were all going to die.

That's because, roughly 25 minutes into their flight, the plane lost cabin pressure. The squad's coach, Chris Holtmann, explained to ESPN what happened from there. "It started to get really cold, and the plane went completely dark," Holtmann told the Worldwide Leader on Friday. "Then all the oxygen masks came flying down, and the flight attendant told everyone to put the masks on. She kept repeating it. We had a really rapid descent. In the span of 10 or 12 minutes, we went from 35,000 feet to 10,000 feet."

Holtmann further recounted the chaotic scene, saying that he could hear players screaming in the back of the plane, and also that the team's coaches were texting their loved ones because they thought this was their last chance. "I was shook. It was scary, we had guys crying," he said. He added that the team used the oxygen masks for roughly fifteen minutes, and also relayed that the pilot told him, "[Those were] some of the longest minutes of my life."

The team made an emergency landing in Pittsburgh and was supposed to take a second charter back to Indy on Friday. However, because that second charter wouldn't be available until late in the afternoon, they ended up taking a bus instead. It's highly doubtful that anybody cared at all about the longer commute.

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