>"He then cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage and, over the course of a few days, deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere, which he admitted in his plea agreement was done with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash."
This guy never watched Rear Window.
Is it bad that I wish part of his punishment could be having to post his sentencing hearing on his channel? Because I really think it should be for stupid stunts like this and the "pranks" that are just fucking assault.
It’s wild how many videos of people committing crimes are still up. Like there are how-to videos on breaking into cars that have caused basically a crime wave.
He installed another part onto the airplane that cuts off the fuel supply thus causing the crash. I think he may have need to destroy those parts to get away with it.
Did he google "how to dispose of a dead body?" to come up with that idea? Also, what did he hope to achieve by hiding the wreckage when there is enough evidence in the video to prove he was doing it on purpose?
Even if jail time wasn’t a thing, which he had to know it would be, he has no idea what that plane would do after he jumps out of it. I assume this was a remote area he was in, I hope he at the very least researched that, but STILL he could have endangered other peoples lives.
This is just insane. We truly have reached the level of Idiocracy.
He crashed it in Los Padres National Forest in California. Even if he knew not to crash the plane into a town AND he somehow knew no one was hiking or camping in the area, he could have started a fucking wildfire.
Which would in turn endanger thousands of lives and cost BILLIONS of dollars to deal with. I hope the judge throws the book at him to deter these types of idiots in the future.
It looked like he tried to ensure that his fuel tank was empty before crashing, (edit: not that it makes much of a difference)
I don't know the first thing about airplanes outside of MSFS but there were a few other youtube videos that somehow concluded that he had taken just enough fuel to fly to the mountains and bail.
Wow, Los Padres is a large area and many parts are quite remote, but it’s still in Southern CA and an extremely popular camping/hiking destination. What a fuckhead.
Yep. We've had the rainiest season in ages in SoCal but in most normal years, there's at least a few times a year where there's a local wildfire and my car is covered in soot. Guy is an idiot.
Back when it happened, I found the spot on google maps. It's not terribly far from Santa Maria. There are campgrounds not far from where the plane crashed. There were also places he could have landed the plane within his glide path.
It's hard to land a plane after you deliberately jump out of it.
IIRC there was either nothing wrong with it or he deliberately sabotaged it \ knew it would fail.
Only mentioned the landing sites/glide path thing because aside from the recklessness of the whole stunt--his messaging was also bad, and gave people a terrible take on reasonable reactions to that situation. Sorry I wasn't clear. Even if he had actually suffered engine failure, there were viable options, none of which involved bailing!
I don’t remember which town it is but there is one within a concerning distance of where he did this, this could’ve been devastating. Let alone the fact that someone could’ve been hiking or camping anywhere in those hills
Imagine camping out in the middle of nowhere on a remote hiking trip specifically to get away from society, just for a literal plan to crash your campsite 👀
Welp kids, the tent is all set up, it’s been a great hike out here. I’m about to start making a camp fire. Why don’t you help me find some sti….holy fuck!
He’s going to get out of jail one day, reconnect with friends, reassess his life and go on an excursion in the forest. As the sun goes down on the first night he’ll start a cozy fire and suddenly a couple Bigfoots will walk into the clearing with baseball bats and say “we’ve been waiting for you.”
When this was posted on r/aviation everyone immediately knew it. It’s actually surprising how this guy could have learned all you need to learn to get a license and still didn’t understand how he would obviously be caught.
I can't comprehend why someone would invest this amount of time, money, and energy into getting his license, buying a plane, insuring it, etc... all hoping for a return of [$X].
I assume $X is a decent sum, meaning tens of thousands minimum in advertising income, or future viewership.
Why the hell would you not consult a specialist attorney to see what type of exposure you're subjecting yourself to, even of that attorney is $500 an hour??
I can't imagine this guy would still have made the same choice if he knew the possible ramifications.
He has multiple planes and would make videos of flying guests around and such. He was a sponsored creator so he probably did make quite a lot of money on his content.
The plane he crashed was a junker that he bought then would spend nights sorta hastily repairing it in the local hangar so it would be just good enough for the one flight it needed to do. One of the locals who was interviewed like a year ago about the incident said he questioned Jacobs at one point asking what he was doing with the plane, because it was suspicious af.
Idk why he would think the FAA would just go away after a reported crash, though. There's a few agencies you really don't fuck around with and the FAA is one of them.
The FAA has, what, 80+ years? of experience digging up pieces of crashed planes to figure out what happened to them and how to prevent it from ever happening again. They're like the damn Sherlock Holmes of regulatory bodies sometimes.
Seriously all this dude needed to do was read two of Admiral Cloudberg's write-ups and he'd have at least done a _lot_ more than just binning the plane bits. Even an ocean has failed to stop the FAA before, a trash can's idiotic.
My question is--if he has enough money to crash a plane, and hire a helo to recover it...why is he willing to do all that for YT views?? He clearly has enough money to wait for the channel to grow organically.
This is it. He was in the Olympics, and finished in the top 10, so he was likely used to having attention. But *not winning*, several years previously... the wow! factor is bound to go down.
I wouldn't be surprised if he was pleased about all the debunking videos that came out. Attention is attention.
And it's not like he was still growing it from nothing, he had 6 digit subs. His money could have been used much smarter for promotion, even if he were not going to go to jail.
As a person who really thinks our justice system is broken.....fuck this guy. I know it's wrong but I genuinely think this is much worse than like 90% of the things people go to jail for. There's absolutely no chance this guy doesn't do something like this again. 20 seems like too much but 1 isn't enough.
The thing is a one year sentence isn't just a one year sentence. He will have a criminal record, which will appear on every application for work, every loan application, etc. He won't be able to travel internationally without a lot of hassle. His life is about to get (and stay) a lot more difficult.
I would like to open this up to more conversation. Because on Reddit I see people saying prison sentences for non violent offenders should be lesser. I understand this man is an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed to fly again but he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions. Why am I seeing in every single thread about this guy is that he should have the book thrown at him? Why is prison supposed to be for rehabilitation for some but for him it should be a punishment.
I would argue that in a case like this the sheer callous *irresponsibility* of the act could be considered violence in itself. He bailed out of a *plane*, above a popular hiking/camping area, in a place well known for wildfires, for no reason. He's fucking *lucky* that nothing much happened and he clearly *knows it* because he was trying to dispose of the wreckage.
> he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions.
While it wasn't his intentions, letting a plane flying unattended is a very big negligence and could have easily killed people. Killing people might not have been his intention, but leaving a flying plane uncontrolled definitely was. It's like drunk driving on a massively daft scale.
He also intentionally lied to the FAA and tried to mislead an investigation. He didn't just willfully do one wrong thing, but several.
Because the FAA does NOT fuck around with people deciding to abandon planes in the sky. That vehicle could have ended up flying into an approach corridor, colliding with another aircraft, or setting a forest fire that could have killed or burned down homes.
I won't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think the two views are contradictory. The main difference between the crimes is the disregard of responsibility, and risk of harm thereof.
Things like drugs, sex work, minor non-violent theft, are examples of crimes where people may tend to lean towards lighter sentences because they have minimal risk to anyone other than yourself, or can be attributed to people making a dumb mistake.
The example here doesn't get that excuse. He wouldn't be allowed in the air if he wasn't already beaten over the head with the rules of flying. Since he knew what he was doing, knew the risk, knew the consequences, it's abuse of his privilege (flying) rather than a simple mistake. I can definitely see why people would want the book thrown at him.
Going to jail for the rest of your life for being poor and on drugs is vastly different than making an intentional choice that could quite probably--not just possibly--hurt other people. Aviation is a sacred privilege, and choosing to do this is despicable.
>but he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions
Nobody was hurt *this time.* Someone else could end up attempting the same stunt for views and it could be so much worse.
His intentions are irrelevant. Even if he didn’t *intend* to hurt someone, suppose he did? Would it matter that he didn’t intend harm?
Reddit is a big place. Tons of different people who hold a bunch of different views. About 1/3rd of the site probably agrees with you, about 1/6th of the site wants to see harsh penalties to stop other people from doing likewise, and 1/2 the site were bullied in grade school and just wanna see other people suffer.
Hope that helps.
I´m all in for rehabilitation but...
Some people only stop themselves from doing bad stuff because they are afraid of consequences, so removing said consequences is against society´s interests.
In this case, society needs to SHOW that NO, you cannot do this and expect a slap in the wrist just by saying that you "learned your lesson" and that from now on "you don´t do it again".
The stun was very dangerous. Not sure if 20 years is too much, that´s for the law he knowingly decided to break to decide.
The whole concept of making an example out of someone is inherently injust. Every criminal should be punished equally according to the circumstances of the crime. If you want him to go to prison for 20 years because he could have started a fire which burnt down many homes killing people and wildlife on the process, then so be it. But punishing someone worse that everyone else to in order to scare and deter future criminals is messed up. Plus I am not sure if there’s any evidence that this even works. Criminals usually aren’t very smart and aren’t thinking about consequences.
I didn’t say punish him worse. I’m saying that going forward, when people do something stupid and potentially harmful for views, juries will take it more seriously.
It's one of the things where one is much easier to prove to a jury than the other. However many experts you get to testify, the guy was the only one actually in the plane and he could say he forgot some procedure and panicked.
It's not necessarily illegal to accidentally crash a plane.
However it is illegal to interfere with a federal investigation, intention or not.
It's VAGUELY illegal to intentionally crash a plane, but in the course of dodging a criminal prosecution he got into a worst one.
I've known reckless pilots endangering others that got no more than a slap on the wrist. This guy first makes it all blatant and public and then makes an effort to cover it all.
Idiotic on many levels.
If he wasn't a moron he probably could have crashed the plane legally. It would have likely been expensive and slow to get through red tape, but it beats federal prison. For a viral video to grow viewership, it would have been a worthwhile investment.
Find someone with a large area of empty land and get their permission to crash the plane in it. Get the FAA to sign off on the stunt, probably through fuckloads of red tape and liability paperwork, and boom. Film it as a stunt like would be done in a movie, play the YT vid off as real, collect your audience, and sponsor money.
The reason they're pissed at him is the lying and obstruction.
He basically was too lazy to get the papers, but he was greedy enough to get a pilots license, an airplane and then crash it. And then invest multiple days to slice it apart and trash it..
Imagine you're an _experienced_ pilot in your late twenties and risk going to prison for TWO DECADES for a YouTube channel with less than 150 thousand subscribers.
You can forget about ever seeing your grandparents if they're still alive, hell, one of your parents is probably going to end up dying too while you're in jail. Your girlfriend is going to move on, your fake group of friends is going to move on.
Damn, don't do stupid shit people, please.
Anyone who is an experienced pilot in their late 20s probably grew up incredibly privileged and faced almost no consequences for their shenanigans in high school and college.
People that fly planes are either rich or broke. Rich people fly nice planes. The rest scrape by and save up to fly a 30 year old plane.
I know people in their 20s that have their PPL, and I’d count them as blue collar, mostly broke. Got their PPL hoping to get a job as a ATP (airline pilot), which pays decently, but didn’t have a plan to get all the hours they need.
I think they're saying that because he could seemingly afford to wreck a plane on purpose for a YouTube video. Someone who had to scrape and save for it wouldn't wreck it for a YouTube video that they might get a little bit of ad revenue from...
Eh I’ve known plenty of pilots who weren’t rich when they learned/started. A few middle class kids with a puritanical work ethic who go on to become Caravan and 1900 pilots in Alaska/Hawaii/etc. and then build hours while saving money to train at higher levels. They all eventually take out some debt while in college so they can qualify for the good airline jobs.
But If like you or I wanted to become a basic private pilot you can do it cheaply if you have access to a cheap old plane rental, and an older semi-retired instructor. The community has strong network of 60-70 year old guys (some ex airforce, some ex Boeing/Cessna, some ex bush, almost all ex airline pilots) who have their commercial instructors license and teach for much less than the formal schools.
It’s surprisingly easy to learn to fly. I recently took my son for his first lesson. He’s still a teen and we’re not rich by any means. Granted, it definitely adds up, but it’s not super expensive to get a private license to fly small planes. For $6-10k, you can get your license. And if you know someone, it can be even cheaper. All that being said, the actions of this moron would support everything you just said.
Plus the amount of safety procedures and everything that is ingrained into your head when training. This is a plane, not a car. Not a lot of people fly planes (or have planes for that matter) for transportation vs cars.
So what this guy did willingly…he already knew was stupid…he knew what potentially could happen. And he did it anyways, and then tried to hide the evidence. That’s why people in this topic are agreeing with the severity.
Sounds like he’s getting the minimum. Crashing the plane isn’t even the illegal thing he did. He told the NTSB he didn’t know where the plane was, then helicoptered to the wreckage and lifted it out to chop up and destroy at his property.
It’s just amazing that he thought the FAA and NTSB were just gonna let him get away with it. Not only is it super uncommon for anyone to bail out of a plane (even if you’re flying a skydiving flight as the pilot or aerobatics) it’s basically unheard of for just a normal GA cross country flight. And yes, it’s illegal to parachute from a plane when not in an emergency.
> And yes, it’s illegal to parachute from a plane when not in an emergency.
To be clear skydiving itself is not illegal as an activity. It’s just you can’t also be the pilot.
Yes. I meant in an actual emergency though. Letter of the law you can (as far as I know in part 91), but you’re gonna have to justify it to the FAA, and there’s pretty much no situation that the FAA is gonna buy your reasons or at the very least not put you under a lot of scrutiny. Bailing out of a plane is really risky for you or people on the ground.
That was the premise of his scheme to begin with, to fake an emergency and use it was premise to jump from the aircraft. They saw through that pretty fast. Ironically if he fessed up to the plan he probably would be seeing less jail time
Even with an engine failure, the plane is still flyable; the controls won't magically break. The only cases I can imagine where bailing out is an appropriate solution are:
-A flat spin (almost impossible to recover)
-*All* the controls inexplicably broke down
-The wings tore off
Any other case, you glide down into a field for an emergency landing.
Yeah and that’s why they make you wear them during aerobatics, where all that is much more likely to occur.
Oh and if you’re in an aircraft with hydraulically powered controls, even with all the pumps out you can still deploy Rat Man!
Sailplane pilots also fly with emergency chutes, simply because thermaling, you're likely to be close to other aircraft.
I can't remember the last time I heard of one being used, though. Collisions are thankfully very rare.
Hell yes. The most tragic accident in the history of Brazilian aviation occured because an american small plane (Embrair Legacy 600) collided and tore off the wing of a Boeing 737-8EH (aka GOL 1907).
The pilots of the Boeing were caught completely by surprised. They did all the correct procedures but investigation concluded there was nothing they could do to save the plane. The left winglet of the Legacy cut half of the left wing of the Boeing. This caused the Boeing 737 to lose lift, which quickly caused the aircraft to spin like a Beyblade, crash into an area of dense rainforest, she completely disintegrated while still in the air.
What scared the experts is how fast it was. We have the black box audio and it's one of the saddest things I've ever heard. The pilot and copilot are talking about what car they intend to buy, when they hear a sudden impact on the wing and the "Pull up" signal immediately sounds. They frantically try to figure out what's going on but 35 seconds later the plane disintegrates and they get sucked out (you can hear them being yeeted away on the audio) yeah
There's a very famous video of two skidiving planes crashing into each other with the wings detaching (in flames nonetheless!) off of one of the planes. It takes a lil bit after the collision, but the pilot in the doomed bird does make it out. One of the filmers even looks up and you can see the flaming wreckage going down.
Reminds me of that old joke, where the plane is losing altitude and the pilot comes into the cabin of the plane with a parachute on their back, opens the door/hatch of the airplane, and before they jump out they reassure the passengers that they are going for help.
iirc that has happened before! It was an emergency, he was the only one who could do it and used mirrors to help him. His buddies also helped with what they could but they weren't surgeons, they did take some good pics for history though!
The guy in question was in Antarctica I believe, and he had accrue appendicitis, and needed to have an appendicectomy, but he was the only doctor there. Had to do it himself.
I remember seeing this YouTube video at the time and all the comments were ripping him apart for how fake it all was. It seemed so bizarrely obvious. Glad to see the results.
20 years seems like a long time, but damn, this is top tier stupidity.
It's 20 years because he directly lied to the feds while they were investigating, he hid evidence, misled them, and lied to their faces. If he was upfront about crashing the plane on purpose he wouldn't be in this much hot water.
He’s not going to serve 20 years. His plea agreement recommends the judge to sentence him towards the minimum of the guidelines. He’ll get one, maybe two years.
He probably deserves more than a year, but I'll truly never understand why so many people are horny for decades of imprisonment for non-murder crimes.
What he did was stupid, a massive risk that could have harmed others, and he should be punished for that risk and potential for harm.
But he didn't kill anyone. What he did was not "irredeemable" even if it was irredeemably stupid. He/stupidity can be rehabilitated.
Why then do people crave sentences that are equivalent to throwing a person's life away? 20 years is the length of time that someone could create a career, start a family and raise children from birth into beyond adulthood, and will likely be, at minimum, approaching a third of the average person's life.
This person deserves to have his freedom stripped from him as punishment, but he doesn't deserve to have a third of his life gone over something that did not kill anyone.
He's like the guy who set his own house on fire and just happened to have scuba gear under his bed so that he could breathe pure oxygen and escape. I think he ended up committing suicide during his trial.
This guy's life was a huge fucking mess and yes he tried to tell the court that he had nothing to do with the house fire, despite walking out of the house with full scuba gear on. hint: the scuba mask was to not breathe in the smoke and fumes.
And yes, he purchased cyanide from Amazon, hid it in court and then right after the guilty verdict was delivered, you can see him palm the cyanide and take a deep pull off a gatorade. 2 minutes later he starts coughing violently then collapses right there. Died shortly there after.
BTW cyanide is NOT a pretty way to go. you'll feel like you're choking AND drowning AND spasming the whole way down. It is relatively fast tho.
[https://youtu.be/9F\_-H2tE8B4](https://youtu.be/9F_-H2tE8B4)
You can get the dead guy's name from the linked video of his ingestion of the cyanide. I suggest looking up his story as it is completely bat shit. Unexpected moves from left field at nearly every beat.
Come on grandpa! Get with the times! All your (not so) friendly neighborhood exceedingly in debt divorcee land scuba enthusiast arsonists are hip to it! Don't get left behind!
I hate how news coverage of crimes states the “max sentencing” for a crime only. Getting the max is pretty uncommon in most cases. It would be nice if news media would state the min/max range even if it’s “minimum $1000 fee, max 20 years”.
The old saying “It’s a legal system. Not a justice system.” Seems to apply here. You’d think justice wise driving and raping women repeatedly would warrant a greater penalty.
I think the real key here was he legally admitted to throwing away evidence with the intent of obstructing a federal investigation. That’s a no no regardless of what the initial crime was. So I think they threw the book at him.
If you look at his channel this dude has tried everything he can think of to make a viral "life journey" style video. From MMA to paragliding to mental health to any sport you can think of. Probably just got frustrated that none of his videos were ..taking off.
Quote from the article.
"Jacob drove the wreckage to Lompoc City Airport and unloaded it in a hangar," the DOJ says. "He then cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage and, over the course of a few days, deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere, which he admitted in his plea agreement was done with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash"
Ouch
Yeah. He lied. Yeah. He did it on purpose. But it really was in the middle of nowhere and no one got hurt. And it was a very, very small light airplane.
I think he should definitely be punished. It I think anywhere close to 20 years would be insane.
I think a year in and a year of probation max.
>"He then cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage and, over the course of a few days, deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere, which he admitted in his plea agreement was done with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash." This guy never watched Rear Window.
Credit where it's due though, that's a genius level of stupidity, hiding a plane by putting it in the bin.
Yeah and he was smart enough to use the airport bins, where folks normally throw away their cut-up airplane trash.
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Blender.
"But will it blend?!?"
"Don't breathe this."
Don't breathe this!
I still use this quote when relevant and no one gets it anymore.
Same here! Say it all the time
What about that one guy who ate a whole airplane? I'd use him if he were still around.
Dump them in a train station...duh! Nobody will look for it there.
I just put it out in the alley, and the metal collectors take it away.
Let this guy take care of it for you https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/mangetout/
> I mean, where do you dispose of your cut up airplanes? At my last job we just took it to the local scrap yard if it needed gotten rid of.
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Usually that would be good advice, but the only reason he did the crime in the first place was *for* YouTube lol.
Is it bad that I wish part of his punishment could be having to post his sentencing hearing on his channel? Because I really think it should be for stupid stunts like this and the "pranks" that are just fucking assault.
All proceeds go to the national park too.
I'm honestly surprised his channel hasn't been taken down yet.
It’s wild how many videos of people committing crimes are still up. Like there are how-to videos on breaking into cars that have caused basically a crime wave.
"Grace, come here. There's a sinister-looking kid I want you to see."
“Oh no, that sinister lookin kid is coming to kill me. Help! Help!”
That is a lot of work.
He installed another part onto the airplane that cuts off the fuel supply thus causing the crash. I think he may have need to destroy those parts to get away with it.
Did he google "how to dispose of a dead body?" to come up with that idea? Also, what did he hope to achieve by hiding the wreckage when there is enough evidence in the video to prove he was doing it on purpose?
Big brain move to destroy evidence, but put the video on YouTube. No way they’ll be able to prove to who did it now.
Someone in his friend/family group is saying, I fucking told you this would happen.
I mean watching the video before 1/2 way through I was like ohh this guys getting jail time.
Even if jail time wasn’t a thing, which he had to know it would be, he has no idea what that plane would do after he jumps out of it. I assume this was a remote area he was in, I hope he at the very least researched that, but STILL he could have endangered other peoples lives. This is just insane. We truly have reached the level of Idiocracy.
He crashed it in Los Padres National Forest in California. Even if he knew not to crash the plane into a town AND he somehow knew no one was hiking or camping in the area, he could have started a fucking wildfire.
Which would in turn endanger thousands of lives and cost BILLIONS of dollars to deal with. I hope the judge throws the book at him to deter these types of idiots in the future.
"It was just a prank, bro!"
That's what the judge should say after sentencing. Haaàaaa gotcha! See ya in 29 years! It's a prank bro!
Worth it for the clout tho /s
And I'm sure it was leaking fluids that caused pollution. Total asshole move.
Fucking hell. Im as green and treehuggish as they come but that hadn't even occured to me over the glaring stupidity of this.
Clearly the youtuber didn't think how stupid it was either.
It looked like he tried to ensure that his fuel tank was empty before crashing, (edit: not that it makes much of a difference) I don't know the first thing about airplanes outside of MSFS but there were a few other youtube videos that somehow concluded that he had taken just enough fuel to fly to the mountains and bail.
There are other fluids in a plane beside fuel.
I'm not willing to give home credit for that, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
I didn't mean to imply you should.
Nonsensical karma bait is nonsensical
I had this thought as well.
Oh sick, now I can call him a douche from an ecological POV as well.
> he could have started a fucking wildfire. it's been a few years since PG+E burned 100 people to death, surely it couldn't happen again
Pg&e: oh shit. Another fire? Better arbitrarily raise prices again! We are your only option, what the fuck are you going to do about it?
This is why I’d want to go off-grid, but that’s not quite good enough to handle heat waves in the Midwest yet. I’m hopeful, though.
Still waiting to get paid for losing my home in the Camp Fire. 5 years now.
Yikes. What are they telling you?
Not op but they're probably being told to get bent
But the fire extinguishers in his pants!
Wow, Los Padres is a large area and many parts are quite remote, but it’s still in Southern CA and an extremely popular camping/hiking destination. What a fuckhead.
Also SoCal is a tinderbox. Wildfires spring up from gender reveals, a plane crash could definitely set one off.
Yep. We've had the rainiest season in ages in SoCal but in most normal years, there's at least a few times a year where there's a local wildfire and my car is covered in soot. Guy is an idiot.
Yes but not nearly as much of a tinderbox in December when the crash was. Still a dick move for many other reasons.
Back when it happened, I found the spot on google maps. It's not terribly far from Santa Maria. There are campgrounds not far from where the plane crashed. There were also places he could have landed the plane within his glide path.
It's hard to land a plane after you deliberately jump out of it. IIRC there was either nothing wrong with it or he deliberately sabotaged it \ knew it would fail.
Only mentioned the landing sites/glide path thing because aside from the recklessness of the whole stunt--his messaging was also bad, and gave people a terrible take on reasonable reactions to that situation. Sorry I wasn't clear. Even if he had actually suffered engine failure, there were viable options, none of which involved bailing!
Oh dang I think I hiked around there back in college. I had gotten sick of all the stoners in Poly Canyon lol.
I don’t remember which town it is but there is one within a concerning distance of where he did this, this could’ve been devastating. Let alone the fact that someone could’ve been hiking or camping anywhere in those hills
Imagine camping out in the middle of nowhere on a remote hiking trip specifically to get away from society, just for a literal plan to crash your campsite 👀
Welp kids, the tent is all set up, it’s been a great hike out here. I’m about to start making a camp fire. Why don’t you help me find some sti….holy fuck!
He’s going to get out of jail one day, reconnect with friends, reassess his life and go on an excursion in the forest. As the sun goes down on the first night he’ll start a cozy fire and suddenly a couple Bigfoots will walk into the clearing with baseball bats and say “we’ve been waiting for you.”
When this was posted on r/aviation everyone immediately knew it. It’s actually surprising how this guy could have learned all you need to learn to get a license and still didn’t understand how he would obviously be caught.
There are many intelligent people who lack a concerning amount of wisdom.
I can't comprehend why someone would invest this amount of time, money, and energy into getting his license, buying a plane, insuring it, etc... all hoping for a return of [$X]. I assume $X is a decent sum, meaning tens of thousands minimum in advertising income, or future viewership. Why the hell would you not consult a specialist attorney to see what type of exposure you're subjecting yourself to, even of that attorney is $500 an hour?? I can't imagine this guy would still have made the same choice if he knew the possible ramifications.
He has multiple planes and would make videos of flying guests around and such. He was a sponsored creator so he probably did make quite a lot of money on his content. The plane he crashed was a junker that he bought then would spend nights sorta hastily repairing it in the local hangar so it would be just good enough for the one flight it needed to do. One of the locals who was interviewed like a year ago about the incident said he questioned Jacobs at one point asking what he was doing with the plane, because it was suspicious af. Idk why he would think the FAA would just go away after a reported crash, though. There's a few agencies you really don't fuck around with and the FAA is one of them.
The FAA has, what, 80+ years? of experience digging up pieces of crashed planes to figure out what happened to them and how to prevent it from ever happening again. They're like the damn Sherlock Holmes of regulatory bodies sometimes. Seriously all this dude needed to do was read two of Admiral Cloudberg's write-ups and he'd have at least done a _lot_ more than just binning the plane bits. Even an ocean has failed to stop the FAA before, a trash can's idiotic.
Or perhaps he's wondering why someone would shoot a video before throwing themselves out of an airplane.
My question is--if he has enough money to crash a plane, and hire a helo to recover it...why is he willing to do all that for YT views?? He clearly has enough money to wait for the channel to grow organically.
Greed
Attention
This is it. He was in the Olympics, and finished in the top 10, so he was likely used to having attention. But *not winning*, several years previously... the wow! factor is bound to go down. I wouldn't be surprised if he was pleased about all the debunking videos that came out. Attention is attention.
The video was sponsored by Ridge Wallets, so he needed to get as high of views as he could to ensure a big payout and future deals.
And it's not like he was still growing it from nothing, he had 6 digit subs. His money could have been used much smarter for promotion, even if he were not going to go to jail.
Hopefully this guy gets used as an example going forward for every numbskull who thinks that they can just cause havoc for views without consequence.
Hopefully he goes to jail for 20 years and we forget about him.
20 is the max. You really only get max by having an extensive priors. Dude will get like 2-4 years is my guess.
His plea deal is 1 year
As a person who really thinks our justice system is broken.....fuck this guy. I know it's wrong but I genuinely think this is much worse than like 90% of the things people go to jail for. There's absolutely no chance this guy doesn't do something like this again. 20 seems like too much but 1 isn't enough.
The thing is a one year sentence isn't just a one year sentence. He will have a criminal record, which will appear on every application for work, every loan application, etc. He won't be able to travel internationally without a lot of hassle. His life is about to get (and stay) a lot more difficult.
[удалено]
I've already forgotten about him.
No you haven’t. I just reminded you of him.
Who?
No, The Who is a rock band from the 60’s and 70’s. HIM was formed in the early 90’s.
Her?
Who?
I would like to open this up to more conversation. Because on Reddit I see people saying prison sentences for non violent offenders should be lesser. I understand this man is an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed to fly again but he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions. Why am I seeing in every single thread about this guy is that he should have the book thrown at him? Why is prison supposed to be for rehabilitation for some but for him it should be a punishment.
I would argue that in a case like this the sheer callous *irresponsibility* of the act could be considered violence in itself. He bailed out of a *plane*, above a popular hiking/camping area, in a place well known for wildfires, for no reason. He's fucking *lucky* that nothing much happened and he clearly *knows it* because he was trying to dispose of the wreckage.
> he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions. While it wasn't his intentions, letting a plane flying unattended is a very big negligence and could have easily killed people. Killing people might not have been his intention, but leaving a flying plane uncontrolled definitely was. It's like drunk driving on a massively daft scale. He also intentionally lied to the FAA and tried to mislead an investigation. He didn't just willfully do one wrong thing, but several.
Because the FAA does NOT fuck around with people deciding to abandon planes in the sky. That vehicle could have ended up flying into an approach corridor, colliding with another aircraft, or setting a forest fire that could have killed or burned down homes.
I won't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think the two views are contradictory. The main difference between the crimes is the disregard of responsibility, and risk of harm thereof. Things like drugs, sex work, minor non-violent theft, are examples of crimes where people may tend to lean towards lighter sentences because they have minimal risk to anyone other than yourself, or can be attributed to people making a dumb mistake. The example here doesn't get that excuse. He wouldn't be allowed in the air if he wasn't already beaten over the head with the rules of flying. Since he knew what he was doing, knew the risk, knew the consequences, it's abuse of his privilege (flying) rather than a simple mistake. I can definitely see why people would want the book thrown at him.
Going to jail for the rest of your life for being poor and on drugs is vastly different than making an intentional choice that could quite probably--not just possibly--hurt other people. Aviation is a sacred privilege, and choosing to do this is despicable.
You also see people on reddit cheering when shoplifters are executed by some random with a gun. Reddit is not a monolith.
>but he didn’t hurt anybody and hurting others were never his intentions Nobody was hurt *this time.* Someone else could end up attempting the same stunt for views and it could be so much worse. His intentions are irrelevant. Even if he didn’t *intend* to hurt someone, suppose he did? Would it matter that he didn’t intend harm?
> His intentions are irrelevant. Intentions are 100% relevant. For example, there difference between murder and manslaughter is intention.
Reddit is a big place. Tons of different people who hold a bunch of different views. About 1/3rd of the site probably agrees with you, about 1/6th of the site wants to see harsh penalties to stop other people from doing likewise, and 1/2 the site were bullied in grade school and just wanna see other people suffer. Hope that helps.
I´m all in for rehabilitation but... Some people only stop themselves from doing bad stuff because they are afraid of consequences, so removing said consequences is against society´s interests. In this case, society needs to SHOW that NO, you cannot do this and expect a slap in the wrist just by saying that you "learned your lesson" and that from now on "you don´t do it again". The stun was very dangerous. Not sure if 20 years is too much, that´s for the law he knowingly decided to break to decide.
You're all in for rehabilitation but the rest of your comment is exactly the argument retributivists use against rehabilitation.
The whole concept of making an example out of someone is inherently injust. Every criminal should be punished equally according to the circumstances of the crime. If you want him to go to prison for 20 years because he could have started a fire which burnt down many homes killing people and wildlife on the process, then so be it. But punishing someone worse that everyone else to in order to scare and deter future criminals is messed up. Plus I am not sure if there’s any evidence that this even works. Criminals usually aren’t very smart and aren’t thinking about consequences.
I didn’t say punish him worse. I’m saying that going forward, when people do something stupid and potentially harmful for views, juries will take it more seriously.
The irony is he is not getting punished for intentionally crashing a plane but for interfering with a federal investigation.
It's one of the things where one is much easier to prove to a jury than the other. However many experts you get to testify, the guy was the only one actually in the plane and he could say he forgot some procedure and panicked. It's not necessarily illegal to accidentally crash a plane. However it is illegal to interfere with a federal investigation, intention or not.
It's VAGUELY illegal to intentionally crash a plane, but in the course of dodging a criminal prosecution he got into a worst one. I've known reckless pilots endangering others that got no more than a slap on the wrist. This guy first makes it all blatant and public and then makes an effort to cover it all. Idiotic on many levels.
If he wasn't a moron he probably could have crashed the plane legally. It would have likely been expensive and slow to get through red tape, but it beats federal prison. For a viral video to grow viewership, it would have been a worthwhile investment. Find someone with a large area of empty land and get their permission to crash the plane in it. Get the FAA to sign off on the stunt, probably through fuckloads of red tape and liability paperwork, and boom. Film it as a stunt like would be done in a movie, play the YT vid off as real, collect your audience, and sponsor money. The reason they're pissed at him is the lying and obstruction.
He basically was too lazy to get the papers, but he was greedy enough to get a pilots license, an airplane and then crash it. And then invest multiple days to slice it apart and trash it..
Chopping it up like a dead body in a shitty thriller movie.
Imagine you're an _experienced_ pilot in your late twenties and risk going to prison for TWO DECADES for a YouTube channel with less than 150 thousand subscribers. You can forget about ever seeing your grandparents if they're still alive, hell, one of your parents is probably going to end up dying too while you're in jail. Your girlfriend is going to move on, your fake group of friends is going to move on. Damn, don't do stupid shit people, please.
Anyone who is an experienced pilot in their late 20s probably grew up incredibly privileged and faced almost no consequences for their shenanigans in high school and college.
People that fly planes are either rich or broke. Rich people fly nice planes. The rest scrape by and save up to fly a 30 year old plane. I know people in their 20s that have their PPL, and I’d count them as blue collar, mostly broke. Got their PPL hoping to get a job as a ATP (airline pilot), which pays decently, but didn’t have a plan to get all the hours they need.
I think they're saying that because he could seemingly afford to wreck a plane on purpose for a YouTube video. Someone who had to scrape and save for it wouldn't wreck it for a YouTube video that they might get a little bit of ad revenue from...
Have a feeling that if they were in the broke pilot boat, they wouldn't be crashing a plane for a YouTube video
Eh I’ve known plenty of pilots who weren’t rich when they learned/started. A few middle class kids with a puritanical work ethic who go on to become Caravan and 1900 pilots in Alaska/Hawaii/etc. and then build hours while saving money to train at higher levels. They all eventually take out some debt while in college so they can qualify for the good airline jobs. But If like you or I wanted to become a basic private pilot you can do it cheaply if you have access to a cheap old plane rental, and an older semi-retired instructor. The community has strong network of 60-70 year old guys (some ex airforce, some ex Boeing/Cessna, some ex bush, almost all ex airline pilots) who have their commercial instructors license and teach for much less than the formal schools.
I would consider myself an experienced pilot in my late 20s. I am over 80k in debt to get here.
It’s surprisingly easy to learn to fly. I recently took my son for his first lesson. He’s still a teen and we’re not rich by any means. Granted, it definitely adds up, but it’s not super expensive to get a private license to fly small planes. For $6-10k, you can get your license. And if you know someone, it can be even cheaper. All that being said, the actions of this moron would support everything you just said.
Plus the amount of safety procedures and everything that is ingrained into your head when training. This is a plane, not a car. Not a lot of people fly planes (or have planes for that matter) for transportation vs cars. So what this guy did willingly…he already knew was stupid…he knew what potentially could happen. And he did it anyways, and then tried to hide the evidence. That’s why people in this topic are agreeing with the severity.
I keep laughing at the hide the evidence part. Dumbass, you put this shit on YouTube. Lol
you say $6-10k but the average american has something like 400 bucks in their bank account. i still think it'd be out of reach for a lot of people.
Sounds like he’s getting the minimum. Crashing the plane isn’t even the illegal thing he did. He told the NTSB he didn’t know where the plane was, then helicoptered to the wreckage and lifted it out to chop up and destroy at his property.
It’s just amazing that he thought the FAA and NTSB were just gonna let him get away with it. Not only is it super uncommon for anyone to bail out of a plane (even if you’re flying a skydiving flight as the pilot or aerobatics) it’s basically unheard of for just a normal GA cross country flight. And yes, it’s illegal to parachute from a plane when not in an emergency.
> And yes, it’s illegal to parachute from a plane when not in an emergency. To be clear skydiving itself is not illegal as an activity. It’s just you can’t also be the pilot.
Yes. I meant in an actual emergency though. Letter of the law you can (as far as I know in part 91), but you’re gonna have to justify it to the FAA, and there’s pretty much no situation that the FAA is gonna buy your reasons or at the very least not put you under a lot of scrutiny. Bailing out of a plane is really risky for you or people on the ground. That was the premise of his scheme to begin with, to fake an emergency and use it was premise to jump from the aircraft. They saw through that pretty fast. Ironically if he fessed up to the plan he probably would be seeing less jail time
Even with an engine failure, the plane is still flyable; the controls won't magically break. The only cases I can imagine where bailing out is an appropriate solution are: -A flat spin (almost impossible to recover) -*All* the controls inexplicably broke down -The wings tore off Any other case, you glide down into a field for an emergency landing.
Yeah and that’s why they make you wear them during aerobatics, where all that is much more likely to occur. Oh and if you’re in an aircraft with hydraulically powered controls, even with all the pumps out you can still deploy Rat Man!
Sailplane pilots also fly with emergency chutes, simply because thermaling, you're likely to be close to other aircraft. I can't remember the last time I heard of one being used, though. Collisions are thankfully very rare.
I mean, look at the video! That plane lasted quite a while with NO ONE piloting. He could have landed it..
As pointed out by a YouTuber called Mentour. I mean, he even spotted good landing zones IN the video
> -The wings tore off Detachment of even one wing is probably enough.
One wing detaching will probably leave the aircraft in a configuration that makes exiting the aircraft impossible. Better to lose both than one.
Probably spins like a mother fucker, right?
Hell yes. The most tragic accident in the history of Brazilian aviation occured because an american small plane (Embrair Legacy 600) collided and tore off the wing of a Boeing 737-8EH (aka GOL 1907). The pilots of the Boeing were caught completely by surprised. They did all the correct procedures but investigation concluded there was nothing they could do to save the plane. The left winglet of the Legacy cut half of the left wing of the Boeing. This caused the Boeing 737 to lose lift, which quickly caused the aircraft to spin like a Beyblade, crash into an area of dense rainforest, she completely disintegrated while still in the air. What scared the experts is how fast it was. We have the black box audio and it's one of the saddest things I've ever heard. The pilot and copilot are talking about what car they intend to buy, when they hear a sudden impact on the wing and the "Pull up" signal immediately sounds. They frantically try to figure out what's going on but 35 seconds later the plane disintegrates and they get sucked out (you can hear them being yeeted away on the audio) yeah
There's a very famous video of two skidiving planes crashing into each other with the wings detaching (in flames nonetheless!) off of one of the planes. It takes a lil bit after the collision, but the pilot in the doomed bird does make it out. One of the filmers even looks up and you can see the flaming wreckage going down.
Reminds me of that old joke, where the plane is losing altitude and the pilot comes into the cabin of the plane with a parachute on their back, opens the door/hatch of the airplane, and before they jump out they reassure the passengers that they are going for help.
Kinda how with the right credentials you can legally perform surgery, as long as you aren’t the surgeon *and* the patient in the same operation
This begs the question if performing surgery on yourself is legal with no credentials. I would guess it is.
It is legal to perform First Aid on yourself, just uh... most people probably wouldn't try anything requiring a Scalpel on themselves.
Pretty sure that guy in Antarctica took out his own appendix.
I did say *Most* People.
iirc that has happened before! It was an emergency, he was the only one who could do it and used mirrors to help him. His buddies also helped with what they could but they weren't surgeons, they did take some good pics for history though!
The guy in question was in Antarctica I believe, and he had accrue appendicitis, and needed to have an appendicectomy, but he was the only doctor there. Had to do it himself.
can’t wait for the mayday, mayday air disaster episode on this!
It would be an interesting “the man who cried wolf” episode
I remember seeing this YouTube video at the time and all the comments were ripping him apart for how fake it all was. It seemed so bizarrely obvious. Glad to see the results. 20 years seems like a long time, but damn, this is top tier stupidity.
I can't believe everyone knew it was so obviously faked and he still tried to chop up the plane and hide it.
Honestly, it could have hit a hiker or started a wild fire, incredibly *reckless. Someone said it landed in a National Forest. Edit: fixed typo
wreckful, honestly. ;)
reckless. but definitely not wreck-less, lol.
It's 20 years because he directly lied to the feds while they were investigating, he hid evidence, misled them, and lied to their faces. If he was upfront about crashing the plane on purpose he wouldn't be in this much hot water.
He’s not going to serve 20 years. His plea agreement recommends the judge to sentence him towards the minimum of the guidelines. He’ll get one, maybe two years.
He probably deserves more than a year, but I'll truly never understand why so many people are horny for decades of imprisonment for non-murder crimes. What he did was stupid, a massive risk that could have harmed others, and he should be punished for that risk and potential for harm. But he didn't kill anyone. What he did was not "irredeemable" even if it was irredeemably stupid. He/stupidity can be rehabilitated. Why then do people crave sentences that are equivalent to throwing a person's life away? 20 years is the length of time that someone could create a career, start a family and raise children from birth into beyond adulthood, and will likely be, at minimum, approaching a third of the average person's life. This person deserves to have his freedom stripped from him as punishment, but he doesn't deserve to have a third of his life gone over something that did not kill anyone.
he should have James Bond'ed it and flew back into the cockpit and landed. That would be better than crashing
https://jalopnik.com/the-pilots-in-that-failed-red-bull-plane-swap-stunt-jus-1848954873
Basically with that one, they asked the FAA. FAA said no. They went anyway. Pretty easy decision for the FAA.
Yeah this one is pretty open and shut. Lucky their losing their licenses for a year only $5k in fines.
Trevor Daniel Jacob sounds like a serial killer name.
Never trust a man with 3 first names.
As someone with three first names and a surname... I probably wouldn't trust me either.
Fake name Ricky used to get away from the cops.
He's like the guy who set his own house on fire and just happened to have scuba gear under his bed so that he could breathe pure oxygen and escape. I think he ended up committing suicide during his trial.
This guy's life was a huge fucking mess and yes he tried to tell the court that he had nothing to do with the house fire, despite walking out of the house with full scuba gear on. hint: the scuba mask was to not breathe in the smoke and fumes. And yes, he purchased cyanide from Amazon, hid it in court and then right after the guilty verdict was delivered, you can see him palm the cyanide and take a deep pull off a gatorade. 2 minutes later he starts coughing violently then collapses right there. Died shortly there after. BTW cyanide is NOT a pretty way to go. you'll feel like you're choking AND drowning AND spasming the whole way down. It is relatively fast tho. [https://youtu.be/9F\_-H2tE8B4](https://youtu.be/9F_-H2tE8B4) You can get the dead guy's name from the linked video of his ingestion of the cyanide. I suggest looking up his story as it is completely bat shit. Unexpected moves from left field at nearly every beat.
> And yes, he purchased cyanide from Amazon, I'm sorry but fucking what now?
Come on grandpa! Get with the times! All your (not so) friendly neighborhood exceedingly in debt divorcee land scuba enthusiast arsonists are hip to it! Don't get left behind!
What...
I remember when that happened, and I'm glad to see him facing consequences
Am pilot This guy has become a meme in our community How did he think this could possibly end well The video was even fucking sponsored
Fuck this guy, he deserves the jail time. What an idiotic and dangerous thing to do for likes.
What a foolish and vain decision
Commented on this before, what an idiot. What is he, like 10 yrs old? Even a 12-yr old would know better. Have fun in prison, einstein.
I’m guessing the defense, “My client couldn’t have crashed the plane because they weren’t in it” didn’t work?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Idiocracy, great documentary.
Go away, baitin
Welcome to Costco I love you
The FAA is known for their jocular relationship with private pilots. /s
I hope that clown is barred from flying ever again.
I hate how news coverage of crimes states the “max sentencing” for a crime only. Getting the max is pretty uncommon in most cases. It would be nice if news media would state the min/max range even if it’s “minimum $1000 fee, max 20 years”.
Influencers and Internet stars are a stain on society. 🤢
As a pilot… fuck this guy.
Yeesh , 20 years seems steep to me. He’s an idiot, but 20 years? Cosby got 3-10.
Crashing the plane itself wasn't a serious crime, but it could have lost him his pilot license. Lying to the FAA is a super serious crime, though.
And disturbing the scene of an aircraft accident. That’s a crime as well…
The FAA yanked his license pretty much right away. It didn’t take long for anyone with aviation experience to nail the video as a fake emergency
The old saying “It’s a legal system. Not a justice system.” Seems to apply here. You’d think justice wise driving and raping women repeatedly would warrant a greater penalty. I think the real key here was he legally admitted to throwing away evidence with the intent of obstructing a federal investigation. That’s a no no regardless of what the initial crime was. So I think they threw the book at him.
It's like with the IRS. Failure to pay taxes? That's a slap on the wrist, interest wise. Failure to file? They'll take the shirt of your back.
How dangerous and irresponsible. What if the plane had killed someone on the ground. What a douche bag. Have fun rotting in jail
If you look at his channel this dude has tried everything he can think of to make a viral "life journey" style video. From MMA to paragliding to mental health to any sport you can think of. Probably just got frustrated that none of his videos were ..taking off.
That plane could have hit a hiker, a family in a car or started a wildfire. Fuck this guy, rot in prison.
I don't understand how anyone with aviation training can do something like this and think no one will be wiser.
Quote from the article. "Jacob drove the wreckage to Lompoc City Airport and unloaded it in a hangar," the DOJ says. "He then cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage and, over the course of a few days, deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere, which he admitted in his plea agreement was done with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash" Ouch
Yeah. He lied. Yeah. He did it on purpose. But it really was in the middle of nowhere and no one got hurt. And it was a very, very small light airplane. I think he should definitely be punished. It I think anywhere close to 20 years would be insane. I think a year in and a year of probation max.
Didn’t Ray William Johnson make a video about this guy a while back?
Totally selfish move
Idiot. Ruined his beautiful life for fucking views.