Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Youtube

The Feds Are Investigating a YouTuber Accused of Crashing a Plane For Views (thedrive.com) 185

A YouTuber and former Olympic snowboarder has been accused of crashing his plane on purpose for clicks, and the FAA has opened an investigation to get to the bottom of the growing mess. The Drive reports: Trevor Jacob has been the subject of online criticism after posting a YouTube video where he parachuted from a Taylorcraft BL64 plane and filmed it crashing into the hills of the Los Padres National Forest near Cuyama, California. The video outlined his newly-purchased Taylorcraft's final flight on Nov. 24, 2021, a trip from the Lompoc City Airport in Santa Barbara to Mammoth Lakes where he planned to partake in some general adventuring like paragliding and snowboarding. [If Nov. 24 rings a familiar bell in your head, that's the same day that D.B. Cooper famously jumped from a hijacked plane with $200,000 in ransom 50 years prior.] Jacob also mentioned that he would be spreading the ashes of his friend Johnny Strange during the flight. Strange was killed in a wingsuit accident in 2015 and Jacob explains that he loved the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

During the flight, however, the Taylorcraft's engine supposedly lost power, stalled, and could not be restarted. Jacob then points the plane nose-down and exits, sending the unoccupied aircraft into the ground. Jacob continued to film himself as he descended and proclaimed, "This is why I always fly with a parachute." He then trekked back to the wreckage and hiked until a farmer, who he credits with saving his life, found him in the darkness. This is where things started to go south.

The video of the incident was posted to YouTube where it immediately began racking up views. The aviation sector of YouTube wasted no time picking apart Jacob's claims. At the time of writing, the video has reached over one million views. It also amassed more than 5,000 comments, many of which called out the crash as being staged. Comments on the video have since been turned off, but that hasn't stopped people from making reaction and explainer videos that point out abnormalities in the pilot's videos. It's worth noting here that some suspect the video currently on Jacob's YouTube to be a trimmed-down version of what was originally uploaded. However, a few of the segments can be found when looking at other videos uploaded by YouTubers critiquing the pilot's handling of the situation. [...]
"Whether or not Jacob will be prosecuted for the crash, or if he will have his pilot's license revoked, will take some time to play out," concludes Rob Stumpf via The Drive. "The FAA is notoriously thorough in investigating matters like these and often takes a year or longer to produce a final report and recommendation. But most importantly, if the FAA does decide he's guilty, it must prove that Jacob showed intent to break the law and federal aviation regulations."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The Feds Are Investigating a YouTuber Accused of Crashing a Plane For Views

Comments Filter:
  • Obvious (Score:5, Informative)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @09:08PM (#62189953)

    I'm a private pilot (regular PPL-ASEL) and this thing has been going around the aviation forums for a few weeks. It's quite obviously staged. Nobody "always flys with a parachute" - much less a full skydiving rig (he wasn't wearing a normal emergency chute). Despite claiming that he "always" flys with a parachute he's never seen wearing one in any other of his Youtube videos while flying. That tiny Taylorcraft could have been easily sat down just about anywhere, yet the first thing he did was bail out of the plane. Oh yeah and grab his selfie stick and film his goofy reaction all the way down.

    Plus he apparently tried (maybe succeeded - I've heard conflicting reports) to charter a helicopter to remove the wreckage before the NTSB could examine it.

    It was a stupid stunt that potentially could have injured someone on the ground or started a wildfire, and it was an absolute waste of a classic airplane. I don't know if there are any criminal charges that will stick, but I hope to goodness the FAA yanks this guys' license for life.

    • Re: Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)

      by klipclop ( 6724090 )
      If I was to him I'd lawyer up and not say anything. Online sleuths always think they know best. I love the incident of the croud sourced Boston marathon bomber detectives. If I recall, lots of innocent people were accused of being the bombers by online d-bags who probably can't hold down a 9-5. I can't imagine the situation being much different here.
      • by N1AK ( 864906 )
        Lawyer up and shut up is pretty much always good advice in situations like this, but the rest of your post is pretty lazy. The points made in the summary aren't guessing who a bomber may or not be, someone looking at the extensive set of flight videos he has on YouTube and seeing he nevers wears a parachute in contradiction of his claim during this crash video that he always wears one isn't controversial or ambigious.
      • There's no question in this video who the party involved is so your example is kind of weird. Clearly the situation is pretty different. Saying nothing is obviously his best tactic, but, it's too late! He already said stuff on the video. Some of those things are specific claims which, if false, will harm him. So you're right, and also wrong, but more to the point he's already not taken your advice.

      • Re: Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @08:35AM (#62191111)

        If I was to him I'd lawyer up and not say anything. Online sleuths always think they know best. I love the incident of the croud sourced Boston marathon bomber detectives. If I recall, lots of innocent people were accused of being the bombers by online d-bags who probably can't hold down a 9-5. I can't imagine the situation being much different here.

        While a cool story, the people who have analyzed his vid include flying instructors and highly qualified pilots. They have caught bits of evidence like his working to make the prop stop rotating for the camera. It should have been windmilling. In fact it was windmilling after he bailed

        The nonsensical inconsistencies of instead of trying to get back to civilization after landing, and hiking back to the wreck to retrieve the cameras that just happened to be in a great place to record, the pilot side door unlatched before the plane suffered it's so called engine failure, and other head scratchers noted by qualified professionals and knowledgeable others. None of the people I've seen appear to be your dirtbags. Problem is, he provided all the evidence needed to show that it was a scripted event.

    • by dasunt ( 249686 )

      That tiny Taylorcraft could have been easily sat down just about anywhere, yet the first thing he did was bail out of the plane.

      To play devil's advocate: Is there a minimum altitude for parachute deployment?

      And if there is, is it better to bail out early while that minimum altitude can be made, or is it better to go down with the plane in an unpowered glide, assuming that the structure of the plane will take a lot of the impact?

    • Re: Obvious (Score:4, Interesting)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @08:23AM (#62191083)
      This behavior is endemic of almost every single genZ youtube star. Almost every fucking one of them are always putting themselves and others at risk for more fame and fortune. Rememeber in 2019 when that one dude jumped off a cruise snip balcony as it was maneuvering into port in Nassau just so it would go viral? With numbers this high, the system itself, not just the youtubers, are part of the underlying issue. They all seemed to have stopped maturing at the age of 15 even as they now approach 25-30. The advertising payouts are way too high. There needs to be some form of curb in play that flattens out payout as they approach a certain level to serve as a disincentive for reckless abandon of safety.
      • Re: Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @01:31PM (#62192105)

        There needs to be some form of curb in play that flattens out payout as they approach a certain level to serve as a disincentive for reckless abandon of safety.

        You are too kind. I can suggest a better curve. It should go to zero, and the channel be entirely banned, and all videos removed and the channel owner should be banned from the platform for a decade.

        People did enough stupid shit growing up when only their immediate friends could see them. We do NOT need a big pile of cash incentives to make that worse. We live in a high tech, high energy society. The opportunities for destruction are far too high to allow this sort of thing to propagate. What happens when some fuckwit decides to aim a truck at an electrical substation, puts a brick on the accelerator, and bails out with his camera, for the fucking ad revenue?

        As other posters have pointed out, this is going to drag through the courts for a decade. The consequences need to be much much much sooner than that, and hit 'em where they live, in their revenue stream.

        • by e3m4n ( 947977 )
          individually I completely agree.. what I am suggesting is not making payments so high we keep making millionaire idiots in the first place. I think the payouts are way way too high. I would rather see it curb toward a max so that 1 million views or 1 trillion views does not change your payout. As you approach 1M views the pay-per-view goes down. Hearing about basement dwellers making $10M/mo. causes a gold rush feeding frenzy of idiots.
    • by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @11:24AM (#62191683) Homepage

      I've been flying for 30 years. I have never seen any one, pilot or otherwise, climb into a airplane with a a parachute.

      • by Corbets ( 169101 )

        I've been flying for 30 years. I have never seen any one, pilot or otherwise, climb into a airplane with a a parachute.

        Uh, well, I climbed into an airplane with a parachute a couple of times.

        I mean, I’m not a pilot, and I was going for the express purpose of skydiving, but I did it

        • Indeed: generally people who wear a parachute onto an airplane are INTENDING to later jump out of it :).

  • MSFS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @09:30PM (#62190005) Journal
    The best thing is, he didn't have to bail out at all.

    I loaded up his crash co-ords and estimated altitude in MS flight sim 2020, in one of the planes that looks exactly-ish like his, cut the engine, and made many safe landings in local riverbeds that were dry in his video.

    Which is basically to say he's either an idiot or a fraud.
    • "either"?...any particular reason to choose the exclusive-or over an inclusive-or?

    • You trust Microsoft's simulation of a Taylorcraft landing on a riverbed? Plus, is it worth that risk? There could be all kinds of obstacles on the riverbed you can't see until it's too late.

      • I truly trust Microsoft simulation of a Taylorcraft landing on a riverbed. Why I don't trust is Microsoft's simulation of a riverbed.
        I grew near a small river, and (even on its dry parts) it's difficult to _walk_ due to small and large boulders. Rolling might be possible with a truck-sized wheel.
        Also, dried riverbeds might contain large branches, partially underground.
        It's a recipe for front-rolling an aircraft. Landing on a fire road might be a much saner option.
        As for "and that he had no reason to hike ba

        • by dasunt ( 249686 )

          I grew near a small river, and (even on its dry parts) it's difficult to _walk_ due to small and large boulders. Rolling might be possible with a truck-sized wheel.

          I will say that at least one river I've researched - a year-round flowing river - is considered practically impassible by a canoe, even with portaging. People have tried, since it would provide a nice canoe route. I'd imaging trying to land at aircraft speeds would be fatal.

          And having canoed many rivers, I'd say that they can be a pain for a

          • Slow flowing rivers will accumulate sand/silt. However, based on the presentation image on the youtube movie, that region is quite hilly.
            So, if the choice is tall trees or riverbeds, then riverbeds might make sense. Yet, the plane apparently landed itself in some bushes.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by N1AK ( 864906 )
      Not a massive fan of this logic. I'm pretty good at rally sims but there's no fucking way I'm driving down forest tracks at 90mph in real life tyvm. I'm relatively ok with the idea that someone may not have been comfortable landing without a functioning engine in those conditions, and it's too debatable a point really. The important thing is he was a long way up and had a number of minutes before he would get near an altitude where he couldn't parachute safely; there are things every pilot has drilled into
  • by stevenm86 ( 780116 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @10:07PM (#62190079)
    Oh, that's interesting. I didn't realize youtube allowed you to make edits after uploading. Maybe they only allow trimming, rather than inserting new content.

    I "youtube-dl"ed the original video and it was 16:41 in length. The current version is 12:53 in length. I expected he edited out the part where the door is cracked open even before the engine dies, and that seems partly to be the case - the head-on shot of the door being latched, then cracked (2:39 in the original video) is gone, but the tail shot of the door (00:54, then 00:48) remains.
    • Oh, that's interesting. I didn't realize youtube allowed you to make edits after uploading. Maybe they only allow trimming, rather than inserting new content.

      From quick googling, there's a built-in editor that seems to be about as simple as you describe. Glad you grabbed the vid early and noticed.

      It is worth noting that Youtube themselves were caught years ago using some capability to untraceably edit new content into one of their own vids:
      https://techraptor.net/technol... [techraptor.net]

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      YouTube started allowing edits for copyright reasons. When you upload your video can get instantly hit with automated copyright claims. You can either edit it offline, or for a quick fix simply mute the audio or cut out the section being claimed entirely.

    • by Syberz ( 1170343 )
      Cracked open door doesn't mean much, in small planes you often keep a door partly open to get some fresh air in because it can get quite warm.
  • by k6mfw ( 1182893 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @10:29PM (#62190113)
    This reminds me of when a aircraft had to make a ditching in Half Moon Bay off coast of California. Very dramatic, all on video from another airplane and from his phone almost immediately after egress and in the water. Scott Perdue of FlyWire points out this ditching has all the marks of a staged event, where the whole smells fishy from the beginning. Scott points out this pilot, David Lesh, has a long track record of doing outrageous stunts and publicity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • Assuming this was a stunt, why was he so obvious about it? If he didn't want to get caught, he could have used a pilot's parachute rather than a sport parachute, flown a number of times with one to make it see less anomalous, created a malfunction that would explain why he couldn't make an emergency landing, and so forth. Is he really stupid? Did he just not care?
    • You are assuming he wasn't stupid. IMHO the evidence doesn't support that assumption.
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Because he's an Ignoramus?

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      YouTubers who pull stunts generally aren't known for their intelligence.

      It sounds like he's an experienced skydiver and paraglider though, in which case he probably knows very well that emergency chutes are there to save your life, but not necessarily your legs or back. There are YouTubers with that kind of commitment to their craft, but they tend not to last very long.

    • There was another video after his, which posed some questions about what he showed himself doing in his crash video.

      There were lots of comments on that video, with one mentioning that he was a trustfund baby who was unbearable as a schoolmate. And there were other interesting comments about him as well, from others who claim to know him.

      There was also a comment that a couple of days after this crash, lawyers were involved in getting certain websites to remove his flight logs.

      I do wonder, if he hired a helic

  • Here's the problem - it will be extremely difficult or even impossible to prove that he didn't have an engine problem. A stupidly high fraction of investigated GA incidents reported as "engine out" involve an engine that works perfectly fine on the ground when the investigator checks it later. If it isn't literally the most common mechanical failure (among the available data) it is close.

    Imagine the expert witness under cross examination:

    defense attorney: The prosecution made a big fuss about the engine

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Many pilots have engine problems. Very few bail out as a response, they land the plane dead-stick.

      • by Falconhell ( 1289630 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @03:21AM (#62190593) Journal

        Exactly right. You dont jump out of a flyable aircraft and just leave it to its fate, and risk others. A glide landing, to a field or river bed would have the correct option.
        Light aircraft pilots rarely fly with a chute, and if they do its not a paraglider type chute, its a standard round emergency chute.
        Either way, the airmanship shown is very poor.

        • Some light aircrafts with the engine stopped are basically chutes .
          The T-10 parachutes used by US Army starting from 1950s have a descent speed of some 7 m/s. A small aircraft might have an unpowered glide descent rate of 1000 fpm, which is some 5 m/s.
          If the airframe is ok, you're safer in an aircraft.

    • It is very easy, however, to determine if he intentionally did not put enough fuel in the tank to cause the wreck. And easier still to tell if the plane was a hacked together parts plane with missing required instruments, parts, etc. The wing tank fuel valve hanging down disconnected in the video isn't a good indication of airworthiness, and the missing instrument panel view as in all of his other videos is a bit fishy as well.

    • by N1AK ( 864906 )
      There is a slight caveat: If what he did was prosecuted the crime he would be accused of wouldn't be "faking an engine failure". To make something up it might be insurance fraud (if it turned out he tried to claim on insurance). Sure, the prosecutor/claimant would be able to win by proving the engine didn't fail but they don't have to they just have to confidence a jury beyond reasonable doubt that he intended to crash.
  • ... stupid wasteful non-sense like this. Especially with moronic dimwitts like this guy appears to be. He most likely could've easily faked this convincingly with a small team of CGI experts for hire, for a fraction of the cost.

    He definitely deserves/needs his license revoked if this turns out to be a deliberate crash-stunt without permission in open public territory.

  • He broke a "don't crash your plane" law?

    There are TV-shows pulling such stunts on a daily base.

    • TV / Movie productions will get a waiver from the FAA if they intend to fly outside the norm. The FAA will probably want a flight plan and safety procedures before they issue the waiver.
    • The majority of aircraft crashes in films are faked or models. The plane/helicopter flies over a hill and is masked/hidden from the camera by an fireball/explosion.

  • by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @10:13AM (#62191393)
    Per 49CFR830.10:

    (d) The operator of an aircraft involved in an accident or incident shall retain all records, reports, internal documents, and memoranda dealing with the accident or incident, until authorized by the Board to the contrary.

    If he's deleted or altered any of the video footage then he's in violation of section d.Doing so could go to show intent vs accident.

    In addition:

    (b) Prior to the time the Board or its authorized representative takes custody of aircraft wreckage, mail, or cargo, such wreckage, mail, or cargo may not be disturbed or moved except to the extent necessary

    If he did remove it or any of the cameras he's in violation of section b as well, unless the FAA authorized its removal. It's interesting the camera filming the instrument panel was off just before the event, after having been on. If the camera was not disturbed investigators could determine if it was turned off or the battery went dead. Given his preparation with cameras it would seem odd that it would not have a fully charged battery. If you were recording teh flight it would seem you'd want all the footage possible, unless of course some might incriminate you.

  • Because we will start seeing videos of people intentionally parking their car in the path of an oncoming train, or purpously crashing into the jersey barriers while speeding down the freeway, or crashing their speedboat into a dock "for the VIEWZ!!1!LOLLARSKATEZ!". And somebody (not the driver) is going to end up getting killed.

    He's lucky his plane did not crash into a house, or else he would at the very least be facing attempted murder charges.

    I hope the judge throws the book at him, becaus

Those who do things in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice are to be avoided at all costs. -- N. Alexander.

Working...