Driver Thought He'd Be Decapitated as United Plane Clips Bakery Truck on NJ Turnpike

The driver of a bakery truck struck by a United Airlines plane on the New Jersey Turnpike thought he would be decapitated just before impact, his father said at a Tuesday news conference.

Warren Boardly Jr. was driving an H&S Bakery truck from Baltimore on the turnpike Sunday when United Flight 169 descended and scraped his 18-wheeler with its landing gear.

"He said he seen a flash and it made him duck and put up his hands," Warren Boardly Sr. said Tuesday.

Dashcam video from Boardly Jr.'s truck captured the moments before and during the collision. It shows him hitting his head on the truck's roof from the impact, an injury that Boardly Sr. and the driver's lawyer, J. Wyndal Gordon, link to an acute head injury.

"He described fear, total fear that he wouldn’t walk away from it, he thought that he would be decapitated. That’s what he thought," Boardly Sr. said.

Boardly Jr. is recovering at home. "He's doing the best he can under the circumstances. He has a lot of pain, a lot of emotional distress that's just not gonna heal overnight," Gordon said at the news conference.

"His mental and emotional status is... you know, it's coming. We have to get him looked at because that was a traumatic experience. I've never known anyone to walk away from something like that. So, you know, he feels the same way. He's struggling with that part of that," Boardly Sr. added.

"Today could have been a day where we are mourning his loss," Boardly Sr. said. He added that had Boardly Jr. been going one mile per hour faster or slower, it more than likely would have killed him. Watching the video "shook me to my core."

Gordon said the family is open to litigation but is focused on determining what happened. "We expect that there's some negligence there because planes just don't drop out of the sky and they just don't ordinarily and routinely hit 18-wheelers traveling along the New Jersey Turnpike,"

"We're not just going to file a lawsuit without having all the facts or having enough facts that we believe that we can reasonably prove our case. So, in terms of litigation, we're nowhere near there. We're in the fact finding process right now just to get enough information to if we needed to file a lawsuit," Gordon said.

The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating. The NTSB told FOX Business it directed United Airlines to secure the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. A preliminary report is expected within 30 days.

United Airlines said in a statement to FOX Business that Flight 169, on final approach to Newark International Airport, hit a light pole. The plane landed safely, taxied to the gate and had no injuries to passengers or crew.