A YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane in Southern California and recorded a video of it in a scheme “to gain notoriety and to make money” has been sentenced to six months in prison for obstructing an investigation into the crash by destroying the wreckage, federal prosecutors said Monday.
The YouTuber, Trevor D. Jacob, 30, of Lompoc, Calif., pleaded guilty in June to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, after he removed the wrecked plane from the crash site in December 2021, just over two weeks after the episode, according to a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
He was sentenced on Wednesday by Judge John F. Walter, and ordered to surrender to the authorities by Jan. 29. “This experience has been so humbling,” Mr. Jacob said in a statement shared by his lawyers. He described the sentence as the “right decision.”
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, on Nov. 24, 2021, Mr. Jacob, a former snowboarding Olympian turned YouTuber, took off in his small 1940 Taylorcraft plane from Lompoc City Airport on a solo flight “purportedly” headed about 215 miles northeast to Mammoth Lakes, Calif. But prosecutors said Mr. Jacob — who had mounted several cameras on the plane and equipped himself with a parachute, video camera and selfie stick — never planned to reach his destination.
Instead, prosecutors said, Mr. Jacob planned to eject himself from the plane during the flight, and video himself parachuting to the ground as it crashed. The mock accident, they said, had been orchestrated to sell a wallet that Mr. Jacob had agreed to promote in one of his videos. Around 35 minutes into the flight, while soaring above the Los Padres National Forest, Mr. Jacob jumped from the plane. He later hiked to the wreck to recover the footage, prosecutors said.
Around two days later, Mr. Jacob reported the crash to the National Transportation Safety Board, which began an investigation and told Mr. Jacob that he was responsible for preserving the wreckage. But when asked where the wreckage was, Mr. Jacob claimed that he did not know.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Jacob then hired a contractor to help him and a friend remove the plane from the forest and load it into the trailer of Mr. Jacob’s pickup truck, which he drove to a hangar at Lompoc City Airport. Over the following days, Mr. Jacob “cut up and destroyed” the wrecked plane, which he put in trash bins around the airport, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said he also lied in an aircraft accident report, falsely claiming the plane lost power. Mr. Jacob also lied to the Federal Aviation Administration, claiming that he had needed to parachute out of the plane because there were no safe landing options, prosecutors said. “This type of ‘daredevil’ conduct cannot be tolerated,” they wrote.
In late December, Mr. Jacob uploaded a 13-minute video of the crash, titled “I Crashed My Plane,” which showed him unleashing a flurry of expletives, before opening the plane’s door and abandoning the plane in a parachute — selfie stick in hand. “I’m just so happy to be alive,” he says after landing in prickly brush. Mr. Jacob then documents a hike through the forest, which he claimed lasted six hours until a farmer found him at dusk.
The video, which had some 1.7 million views, has since been removed from YouTube.
In the weeks after the crash, viewers and experts expressed doubt over its veracity, claiming that it had been orchestrated for views and likes, and that Mr. Jacob would not have been wearing a parachute in ordinary circumstances.
In the statement provided by his lawyers, Mr. Jacob said he had learned more about himself from the criminal case than in his entire life previously.
“I am excited to continue my positive growth as a person through my six month term in prison,” he said. “This was a massive learning experience.” (NYT)
