Trevor Jacob crashed his plane for clicks – 20 years in prison?

Trevor Jacob
Youtuber crashed his plane for clicks – now he faces 20 years in prison

Video blogger and former Olympic athlete Trevor Jacob filmed jumping out of his allegedly malfunctioning plane and causing it to crash. But the defect was a fake, as he now admitted – and it could cost him dearly.

Because he intentionally crashed his plane for a high number of clicks, a YouTuber from the USA faces up to 20 years in prison. The pilot Trevor Jacob had published a spectacular video on the Internet platform that shows the crash and its aftermath and has been viewed more than three million times. As the US authorities have long suspected and finally confirmed, Jacob staged the alleged accident and then obstructed the investigation.

Plane allegedly had an engine failure

Jacob was a former professional snowboarder and represented the USA at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. After his sports career, he maintained a YouTube channel with 138,000 subscribers. On November 24, 2021, he took off from Lompoc Airport in California in an 81-year-old Taylorcraft BL-65 for a flight to Mammoth Mountain, according to the Aerotelegraph portal for aviation news. He had therefore only recently bought the plane. Observers would have described it as “in need of a lot of maintenance”.

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On the way, the machine allegedly had an engine failure. Jacob curses as the propeller stops turning and – filmed by several previously installed external cameras – opens the plane door, drops out and, selfie stick in hand, sails towards the forest. In the meantime, the empty single-engine machine with the cameras running sinks lower and lower and finally crashes on the ground.

Jacob is slightly injured

Jacob is slightly injured when landing with the parachute in the thorny bushes, but finds the wreck in a thicket of dried up bushes and recovers the cameras. After what he says has been a six-hour hike through the wilderness of California’s Los Padres National Park, during which he keeps telling us how thirsty he is and how helpless he feels, a farmer finds him at dusk.

A month later, Jacob posted an extensively edited 13-minute video of the events on his channel, titled “I Crashed My Plane.” In January, he said in a statement that he flew that day to scatter the ashes of his best friend Johnny Strange on top of a Sierra Nevada mountain. Johnny Strange died base jumping in 2015.

Youtuber Trevor Jacob is said to have secretly disposed of the wreck

The FAA opened an investigation into the crash and instructed Jacob not to dispose of the wreckage of the plane. The pilot told authorities he didn’t know where the wreckage was, but according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, two weeks after the crash, he and a friend salvaged the wreckage from the woods by helicopter. He had previously backed up data from the cameras on board.

Contrary to the official order, according to the investigation, Jacob cut his plane into small pieces and disposed of them in garbage cans in and around Lompoc City Airport. The Youtuber has since admitted that he wanted to hinder the federal authorities in their investigations and that he had previously lied when he reported an aircraft accident. The FAA revoked his pilot’s license in April.

Jacob made some mistakes in staging the crash. A number of pilots and flight experts pointed out that the pilot did not take even the simplest steps to restart the engine of the crash-prone plane. Others noted that Jacob could have made a safe landing while gliding. It is also extremely unusual for a pilot in a small aircraft to carry a parachute on his back just in case.

Not looking for a safe place to land

The FAA employees also discovered these abnormalities during an investigation. “During the flight, you opened the left pilot flap before claiming the engine had failed,” the FAA said, according to the New York Times. In addition, Jacob had neither attempted to contact air traffic control on the emergency frequency nor to restart the engine by increasing the airflow over the propeller. He also did not look for a safe place to land, “although there were several areas within gliding range where you could have landed safely.”

Jacob has agreed with prosecutors to plead guilty to vandalism and obstruction of investigation. The court case is expected to begin in the coming weeks. If convicted, the pilot faces up to 20 years in prison.

Sources: AFP, “New York Times”, “aerotelegraph”, Trevor Jacob on Youtube