A California YouTuber who authorities say deliberately crashed his plane and posted a video of it online was sentenced to six months in federal prison for obstructing the investigation by destroying the wreckage.
Trevor Daniel Jacob, 30, an experienced pilot and skydiver, pleaded guilty in June to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation. Jacob destroyed wreckage from the small single-engine plane that he crashed in Los Padres national forest in 2021, authorities say.
The video, titled I Crashed My Airplane, appeared in December 2021 and purported to show Jacob’s small plane have engine failure over the mountainous forest in Santa Barbara county. Already wearing a parachute, he jumped out with a selfie stick camera in hand and filmed his descent.
His jump and the aircraft’s plunge were recorded by cameras mounted on the plane’s wing and tail and by the camera he carried. After landing, he hiked through poison oak and brush to the crash site and recovered video from the onboard cameras, the government said. Jacob then uploaded a 12-minute video of the crash and immediate aftermath to YouTube, which has since been viewed more than 4m times.
“I cut my finger pretty bad. I cut my elbow. I’m just so happy to be alive,” he said in the video immediately after landing.
Investigators found that Jacob did not attempt to restart his engine or find a safe location to land and that he never tried to call air traffic control.
According to the plea agreement, Jacob had a sponsorship deal to promote a company’s product in a video he would post, and he never intended to complete the 24 November 2021 flight from Lompoc airport in southern California to Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The justice department said Jacob later informed federal investigators about the crash, was told he was responsible for preserving the wreckage, agreed to determine its location – and then lied that he did not know the location.
On 10 December 2021, Jacob and a friend flew to the site in a helicopter that was used to lift the wreckage and fly it to a trailer attached to his pickup truck, according to the agreement. He destroyed sections of the plane over several days and placed the parts in trash cans around the airport and elsewhere, which authorities say he admitted to doing in order to mislead investigators.
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Jacob, of Lompoc, California, had his pilot licence revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2022. In a video posted to his YouTube channel on Monday that showed him skydiving, skateboarding and flying a plane, Jacob said he had gotten his pilot license back. While flying he made references to the incident, after a passenger told him he could jump out of the plane. “Guess it wouldn’t be the first time,” he said.
In the video Jacob claimed he wasn’t seeking views but “screwed up” trying to achieve a lifelong goal of abandoning a plane and parachuting out, and that he had received “really bad legal advice” to cover up the evidence associated with the crash.
“You gotta get beat down and broken down to come back stronger,” he said in the video in which he was also promoting T-shirt sales. “I didn’t know a human being could go through this … and endure the suffering and pain this has caused me. But I needed it. I deserved it.”
