Trevor Jacob - Youtuber deliberately crashed plane - now he has to go to jail for it
A Youtuber from the USA has been sent to prison for six months for deliberately crashing his plane in a national park to get high click numbers. As the US authorities announced on Monday, the prison sentence for Trevor Jacob was set in an out-of-court settlement. He had originally been facing up to 20 years in prison.
Jacob had published a spectacular video of the crash and its consequences on the internet platform YouTube; it was viewed more than three million times. According to the US authorities, however, he had staged the accident, which took place in November 2021 in southern California, and subsequently obstructed the investigation.
Trevor Jacob jumped out of the plane with a parachute
Jacob, now 30 years old, used a selfie stick to film himself jumping out of the crashing plane with a parachute over dense vegetation in Los Padres National Park in November 2021. Cameras mounted all over the plane recorded the descent of the out-of-control single-engine plane and its crash.
Jacob's viewers also watched as the pilot climbed to the wreckage of his plane after the crash and was apparently disappointed to discover that the water supplies he had packed were no longer there. Jacob showed how he wandered through forests and over hills in search of help, repeatedly telling people how thirsty he was and how helpless he felt.
When he finally stopped at a water source, a vehicle came along the path in the staged footage and rescued the pilot in time before nightfall.
Youtuber rescued plane from US national park
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched an investigation into the crash and instructed Jacob not to dispose of the wreckage of the plane due to possible investigations. The pilot told authorities he did not know where the wreckage was, but according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, he and a friend recovered the wreckage from the forest by helicopter two weeks after the crash. He had already backed up data from the cameras on board beforehand.
Contrary to official orders, Jacob cut up his plane into small pieces over the next few days and disposed of them in garbage cans in and around Lompoc City Airport, according to the investigation. He later confessed that he had tried to obstruct federal authorities in their investigation and had previously lied in his report of an airplane accident. The FAA revoked his pilot's license in April.
Plane crash staged for YouTube
Jacob had apparently made a number of mistakes when staging the crash. A number of pilots and aviation experts pointed out that the Youtuber had not even taken the simplest steps to restart the engine of the plane in danger of crashing. Others noted that Jacob could have made a safe landing in gliding flight. It was also extremely unusual for a pilot in a small aircraft to carry a parachute on his back just in case.
According to the findings of the public prosecutor's office, Jacob "most likely staged the crash to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to benefit financially from it". "Nevertheless, this kind of 'daredevil' behavior cannot be tolerated," the public prosecutor's office emphasized.
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Source: www.stern.de
