Trevor Jacob is the protagonist of a recent viral video on YouTube entitled “I Crashed My Plane”. Published in December 2021, it documents what initially appears to be a smooth journey for the pilot in his new plane that ends up getting complicated just like a Tom Cruise movie.
Jacob experiences a supposed failure in his aircraft and ends up jumping out of it by parachute, recording everything conveniently with the different cameras located in the plane and even taking out a selfie stick when jumping for his life. There was no lack of those who accused him of doing it on purpose to gain visits, and now he has ended up gaining the attention of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States.
“That’s why I always fly with a parachute”…
According to Jacob, the trip in his recently purchased Taylorcraft BL64 would be from the Lompoc City Airport in Santa Barbara to the small town of Mammoth Lakes. There he planned to go paragliding and snowboarding, as well as scattering a friend’s ashes during the flight.
Everything was going fine until during the flight, the plane’s engine supposedly loses power, stalls and Jacob is unable to restart it. The pilot ends up pointing the aircraft down and launches from it before it crashes. Everything can be seen in the video captured from various angles.
This is the shortest part of the entire video, most of the content comes later, with Trevor walking through the desert to the plane crash site. In the end, during the night hours, a supposed farmer picks him up and saves his life, just like the parachute that Jacob claims he always carries on his flights, something that the Internet was quick to deny when several users reviewed the youtuber’s other aviation videos and found that he did not actually have a parachute in them.
The video has days with the comments closed, but it had already amassed at least 5,000 since its publication, and the majority they accused him of planning everything and crashing the plane on purpose. Other YouTubers from the aviation world even dedicated their own videos to collecting evidence that suggests why the whole thing could be a lie.
The video has already amassed more than 1.4 million views., but the attention that Jacob has gained with his feat is not limited to the Internet, since the incident is already being investigated by the FAA, the government entity responsible for the regulation of all aspects of civil aviation in the United States.
Among the suspicious details about the video, different experts have pointed out things like that the aircraft could be piloted for another 25 to 30 kilometers without the need to jump in that way, or that using parachutes on small planes is not common because there are usually no enough space. Other than what anyone can see on the video, the pilot didn’t seem particularly scared or worried.
Whether the aircraft malfunction was real or not will be determined by the authorities, but Jacob faces the possibility of facing charges for the incident and losing his pilot’s license. Otherwise, he’s a very lucky man who was saved from a life-threatening accident and also has a successful video on YouTube.