“I’m just so happy to be alive,” said Trevor Jacob in one of his YouTube videos, titled ‘I Crashed My Plane’.
Jacob had somehow managed to film the entire plane crash, from the moment the propeller allegedly stopped spinning to the moment he flung himself out of the plane, parachuting to the ground with a selfie stick in hand, walking the wilderness, and then finally being miraculously saved by a farmer.
Somewhere in the distance, his viewers were also treated to a shot of his plane barrelling towards California’s Los Padres National Forest mountains.
The pilot influencer posted the video four months ago and was immediately accused of faking the whole ordeal to get views.
Indeed, the video has been watched more than 2,2 million times on YouTube since being uploaded in December:
A few standout facts suggest it might not have been as death-defying as the YouTuber made it out to be.
As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been probing the matter, eventually ruling that Jacob crashed the plane as a wild publicity stunt.
…The FAA cited several pieces of evidence that Jacob intentionally crashed his plane in November, saying he did not call air traffic control, try to restart the engine or attempt to land the plane “even though there were multiple areas within gliding range in which you could have made a safe landing.”
The fact that selfie sticks and cameras were involved at every step was also a case in point for the FAA, mentioning how Jacob even disposed of the plane wreckage and recovered the cameras he had attached to it.
On April 11, the FAA told Jacob he is banned from flying for operating the single-engine aircraft in a “careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another,” according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.
“You demonstrated a lack of care, judgment and responsibility by choosing to jump out of an aircraft solely so you could record the footage of the crash,” the agency said. “Your egregious and intentional actions on these dates indicate that you presently lack the degree of care, judgment and responsibility required of a certificate holder.”
The agency went ahead and revoked his pilot’s license before he does anything this reckless again. Naturally, this created an opportunity to create more content:
Jacob also filmed himself mailing in his pilot’s license, wearing a shirt that stated in bold black letters: “ALWAYS WEAR YOUR PARACHUTE.”
As Jacob traveled to the post office, he said: “The aviation community has been pretty tough on me, so I’m thinking about quitting altogether and giving up, just because I’m hated.”
Jacob was criticised for wearing a parachute during a supposedly reasonably safe flight but says that he does so during every flight.
I guess he hasn’t watched some of his other YouTube videos, where he is flying and clearly not wearing one.
