Sharon Osbourne has opened up about the tragic death of Randy Rhoads that took place on Ozzy Osbourne’s tour more than 40 years ago, on March 19, 1982.
Speaking in Hulu’s eight-part documentary series Into the Void: Life, Death & Heavy Metal, Ozzy’s wife and manager said she’s still haunted by the young guitarist’s death and thinks about Rhoads “all the time.”
Osbourne explains that the band’s tour bus made an early morning stop at Flying Baron Estates, an aviation compound in Leesburg, Florida, after the air conditioner broke down. While the others slept, the driver, Andrew Aycock — a private pilot — commandeered a small plane on the property and took Rhoads and the band’s makeup artist Rachel Youngblood up for ride.
It quickly turned to tragedy when Aycock tried to buzz the tour bus and lost control. One of the plane’s wings clipped the bus, sending the plane toppling into a nearby house, where it crashed and burst into flames.
“There was this terrible smell of fuel, and all we could see was fire,” Osbourne recalled in the documentary. “I just went out, and the tour manager was on the grass with his hands over his head. I kept thinking, You’re asleep, you’re asleep! Wake up, wake up!”
Tommy Aldridge, Ozzy’s drummer at the time, remembers her reaction to the horror that unfolded that morning.
“When Sharon realized that Randy and Rachel had been killed, she came unglued,” he says. “She just went off on our tour manager, screaming, ‘How could you let that baby get on that plane!’”
Osbourne recalled the difficulty of having to tell Rhoads’ mother the news and “try and make sense” of the tragedy.
“Now you know why I didn’t want to talk about Randy,” she said, breaking into tears.
Ozzy, who died this past July 22, said in recent interviews that the accident continued to haunt him decades afterward.
“Every time I talk about that, the tape starts to run in my head of that day when he died,” he told British GQ in 2020. “It was awful. It was like a bad fucking horror movie. The house was on fire. The bus had been hit by the plane. There was glass and gasoline everywhere. The fucking house was engulfed.”
The singer said he felt responsible for the guitarist’s death, noting in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, “if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died.”
Osbourne said was enamored both of Rhoads and his abilities on electric and acoustic guitar.
“He was not only a great rock and roll player, but in the classics, and in every other field, he was phenomenal,“ he told Guitar Player in a 1982 interview, shortly after Rhoads died.
“I loved him in an instant,” he added. “I fell in love with him as a player, and I fell in love with him as a person.“
