Rossana D’Antonio: ...that I’d spend years proving what really happened in 26 seconds

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this unforgettable episode of Nobody Told Me, we sit down with Rossana D’Antonio — engineer, truth-seeker, and author of the haunting memoir 26 Seconds: Grief and Blame in the Aftermath of Losing My Brother in a Plane Crash. Rosanna talks about the day her younger brother Cesare died in a commercial plane crash just moments before he was supposed to land safely.

But this isn’t just a story about a tragedy. It’s about what happens after the cameras leave. After the system points fingers. After your loved one is blamed for their own death.

Rossana opens up about the heartbreak of losing Cesare, the painful process of watching him be scapegoated by the airline industry, and the years she spent digging through wreckage — literal and emotional — to uncover the truth. Together, we talk about grief, rage, silence, memory, and what it means to become your loved one’s final advocate.

This conversation is raw, real, and deeply human. If you’ve ever felt powerless after a loss, or if you’ve ever had to fight to be believed, Rossana’s words will stay with you long after the episode ends.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens, and today's episode is going to stay with you. We know that before we even begin. It's about loss, yes, but it's really about love, about truth, about the fight to be heard when the world is ready to move on. Our guest today is Rosanna
0:21.8	D. Antonio. She's an engineer, a former L.A. County executive, and the author of the book 26 seconds,
0:28.5	grief and blame in the aftermath of losing my brother in a plane crash. The crash was obviously devastating,
0:34.5	but what came after the way her brother was blamed, the way silence
0:38.6	tried to bury the truth was a second kind of death. And Rosanna refused to let that be the end
0:44.9	of the story. This conversation is going to crack something open for a lot of you. And whether you've
0:49.8	lost someone, been mischaracterized, fought for justice, or just felt like grief made you unrecognizable,
0:56.0	Rosanna gets it. And she puts words to things most of us were never taught to say out loud.
1:00.3	It's a conversation about memory, legacy, and the things we do and become for the people we love.
1:06.7	Rosanna, thank you so much for joining us. Well, first of all, Jan and Laura, thank you so much for having me on the show.
1:14.0	Well, we really appreciate this and want to bring your story to the attention of the public.
1:19.3	I know you talk about how everyone else's story about a plane crash ends when the news turns off.
1:25.1	But for you, that's where it all began.
1:29.4	So tell us about the crash.
1:38.0	What happened? Yeah. So thank you for the question. So interestingly, I happen to have been in Spain a vacation. My husband and I were celebrating our third wedding anniversary,
1:46.2	which we had celebrated two days prior.
1:48.3	It was our final night in Barcelona.
1:56.0	We got back to the hotel with the intent of packing and coming back to Los Angeles when we turned the TV on.
2:12.3	And on CNN, there was the breaking news of this plane crash in Honduras, this notoriously dangerous airport called Don Quintin International Airport.
2:17.2	And so that's how I saw what had happened. My immediate thought was with the pilot.
2:21.4	I recognized that the plane was a Taka Airlines aircraft, which is where my brother worked as an airline captain.
2:32.0	But my first thought was, I wonder who the pilot was. And I wondered,
	...

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