Just when you thought people couldn’t get much more stupid someone goes and surprises us all by proving us wrong. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared that influencer Trevor Jacob deliberately crashed his plane in California in December for the sake of a YouTube video.
The FAA has since stripped Jacob of his pilot’s certificate, revoking any permission to fly any kind of aircraft.
The video from December shows Jacob sitting in the pilot’s seat, flying a small aircraft complete with strategically placed cameras inside the cockpit, on the left wing, and on the tail of the plane. Approximately 1 minute into the video we see the propeller has stalled and Jacob is inside the aircraft panicking. Or is he?
He then opens the door to the aircraft and parachutes out of the plane to safety, meanwhile filming his escape whilst holding a selfie stick.
Jacob claimed that the plane had malfunctioned, so he abandoned the aircraft and allowed it to crash into the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. However, in a letter to Jacob, the F.A.A. said he had violated federal aviation regulations and operated his single-engine plane in a “careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.”
Almost immediately after posting the video, people began commenting on the doubtfulness of the video, claiming that it was completely orchestrated for likes and views.
The FAA listed numerous reasons for their decision, aside from the selfie stick. The fact that Jacob was wearing a sports parachute during the flight was a huge red flag. It’s not usual to be wearing a parachute at all during flights of this nature, particularly this type of parachute.
Several other telltale clues were also picked up. “During this flight, you opened the left side pilot door before you claimed the engine had failed,” the F.A.A. wrote. Additionally, before exiting the plane, Jacob made no attempt to contact air traffic control on the emergency frequency, did not try to restart the engine by increasing airflow over the propeller and failed to look for a place to safely land, “even though there were multiple areas within gliding range in which you could have made a safe landing.”
After the crash, Jacob went back to the crash site where he recovered and disposed of the wreckage.
It all sounds too fishy to be believable, particularly knowing several people who hold pilot’s licences and regularly fly these types of planes. I don’t know a single one who wears a parachute at the beginning of a flight, and if they did, I wouldn’t ever fly with them!
At the very least it was an incredibly risky stupid stunt to pull, and Jacob is lucky that it didn’t backfire and end in death or serious injury to either himself or others. Here at DIYP, we have unfortunately reported multiple times on dumb ways to die for the sake of a photo or video. Do we keep having to say this? It’s not worth it!
[Via NY Times]
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