YouTuber jailed for staging plane crash and parachuting out with a selfie stick
A YouTuber who deliberately crashed a plane in California has been jailed for six months after lying to authorities.
Trevor Jacob, 30, was sentenced this week after pleading guilty in June to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation.
The former Olympic snowboarder who is an experienced pilot and skydiver, obstructed the investigation by destroying the wreckage, according to the US Justice Department.
Jacob previously represented the United States in snowboarding in the 2014 Winter Olympics and had success at the Winter X Games but later turned to YouTube and had gathered 100,000 subscribers by January 2022.
His December 2021 video ‘I Crashed My Airplane’ [sic] showed his small plane suffering what appeared to be engine failure, with the propeller stopping as he flew over Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara County.
Jacob ‘most likely committed this offence to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain’, federal prosecutors in California said on Monday.
They added: ‘Nevertheless, this type of ‘daredevil’ conduct cannot be tolerated.’
In a statement, Jacob said that ‘this experience has been so humbling’ and described the sentence as the ‘right decision’.
Before taking off he had told authorities, he was flying to Mammoth Mountain to spread the ashes of his friend Johnny Strange, the Santa Barbara Independent reported.
For his flight on November 24, 2021, Jacob attached cameras to the wings of the plane and he is shown acting in apparent distress before opening the plane door, while airborne, to make a parachute jump.
He is already wearing a parachute and holds a selfie stick as he leaps down, while the plane cameras track it as it flies, unmanned, into the hillside.
In reality, the plane did not have a fault and was written off as part of the stunt.
Later in the clip, Jacob is seen saying ‘I’m hurting all over,’ as he crawls through bushes and down a hillside in pursuit of rescue.
Shortly after the incident, Jacob returned to the crash site and recovered video from the onboard cameras.
While the film has now been taken down from YouTube, versions of it and reaction videos still exist online, meaning that millions have seen the stunt.
The court heard he had a sponsorship agreement to promote a product in his video, that he never intended to complete the flight, and that he crashed on purpose.
It was reported that the justice department said when Jacob later told US investigators about the crash he had agreed to his responsibilities for preserving the wreckage.
However, during this process, he lied about knowing the location of the plane crash.
Then, on December 10, 2021, Jacob and a friend flew to the site in a helicopter and used equipment to lift the wreckage and carry it away.
After collecting the plane’s parts Jacob scattered them into bins. He had his pilot licence revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2022 and will spend the next six months behind bars.
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