A pilot {and professional} YouTuber has run into some bother after he crashed his airplane within the California mountains final month, solely to be accused of doing the entire thing on objective to seize some web page views. Now he’s being investigated by the feds.
Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned social media star, lately crashed a Taylorcraft BL64 airplane into the foothills of the Los Padres Nationwide Forest, filming the whole episode because it occurred, The Drive experiences. Jacob, who has been making YouTube movies for awhile, has claimed that he was en route from Lompoc Metropolis Airport in Santa Barbara to Mammoth Lakes (a Sierra Nevada snowboarding city) when the airplane randomly stalled out, forcing him to desert it. When he escaped, Jacob notably pitched the airplane nose-down, forcing it on a vertical trajectory into the wilderness, earlier than leaping out with a parachute.
A 17-minute video uploaded to Jacob’s YouTube web page, titled “I Crashed My Plane,” captures this whole escapade: from a sunny takeoff, to Jacob’s realization that the airplane is in bother, to his dive out of the airplane door and the discharge of his parachute.
With the assistance of a selfie stick and plane-mounted cameras, we see Jacob plummet via the air, whereas the doomed plane descends decrease and decrease—lastly barreling into the aspect of a hill. Jacob is then compelled to hike via the wilderness till he’s picked up by somebody in a truck (Jacob claims this man was “a farmer”). The video netted Jacob greater than a million web page views.
Nonetheless, it didn’t take lengthy for the web to develop into suspicious of Jacob’s narrative, and YouTube has since develop into populated with movies critiquing the pilot’s story. Aviation professionals have questioned a lot of Jacob’s choices through the flight. For example, the necessity to leap from the airplane appeared suspect to one expert, who provided that the automobile may have been piloted for an additional 15 to twenty miles. Within the video, Jacob additionally makes the declare that he “all the time” flies with a parachute; this declare was subsequently debunked by quite a lot of viewers who famous that, the truth is, he isn’t carrying a parachute in most of his movies and that to take action isn’t notably frequent for small-plane pilots, as there’s often not sufficient room.
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To make issues extra fascinating, the Federal Aviation Administration is now investigating the crash, reports aviation site AVweb. “The FAA is investigating this occasion,” the company instructed the outlet on Monday, whereas declining to remark additional. Whereas there’s not a lot to go off there, an intensive investigation by federal officers ought to be capable to inform whether or not a airplane malfunctioned or was deliberately sabotaged ultimately.
In the end, Jacob is both an harmless man who fairly amazingly survived an wild airplane crash and is now being unfairly pilloried by a paranoid YouTube mob, or he’s a social media influencer doing what influencers do: pull sensationalistic stunts to seize consideration and watch the views roll in.
Including gas to the fireplace is the truth that Jacob really isn’t the primary influencer pilot to get accused of faking a airplane crash. A few years in the past, David Lesh, a former professional skier and the proprietor of a Colorado sportswear firm, was piloting a plane close to Half Moon Bay in northern California when the engine allegedly stalled, forcing him to conduct an emergency water touchdown. The truth that the entire thing was filmed and later uploaded to YouTube led many to consider that Lesh had staged the crash to garner attention for his enterprise.
