Foolish Aircraft Stunt Plays Out in the Justice System Years After Completion

Trevor Daniel Jacob, of ill-thought-out Youtuber stunt fame, will be jailed for 6 months for his actions in recovering and destroying the wreckage of his purposeful aircraft crash.

The very poorly staged video caught aviator attention around the world with a series of very apparent mistakes, showing front and center a foolish attempt to generate viral publicity with a purposefully induced aircraft crash. Jacob’s totally normal and not at all suspicious “habit” of “always wearing a parachute” during long cross countries in a vintage 1940s Taylorcraft just happened to “save” his life, when his suspiciously fuel-starved aircraft sputtered and died. In true flinty-eyed aviator fashion, Jacob decided to almost immediately bail out from the aircraft, despite holding thousands of feet of altitude and an apparently restartable engine. Jacob’s saga only worsened when his first survival instinct was to parachute to earth and hike deeper into the wilderness to recover his camera footage.

After the fact is where he earned his jail time, however. Jacob had been warned that he was responsible for preserving all remains of the incident for the investigation, and agreed to provide the coordinates of the crash along with all his videos of the incident. Jacob dragged his feet in the weeks afterward, playing dumb about the location to the investigators’ continued annoyance.  Jacob loaded up the remains of the Taylorcraft and hauled them back to his initial airport of departure, where he cut up the aircraft and disposed of it in sections throughout a series of trash bins in the area. Federal authorities weren’t fooled by the mysteriously disappearing crash evidence, however, believing that Jacob went through with his own December 10 disposal with “the intent to obstruct [them] from investigating the November 24 plane crash.”

Jacob pleaded guilty to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, a crime that carries a statutory max sentence of 20 years in prison. Ultimately, Jacobs got off much easier than that, and will only have to serve 6 months in federal prison.

FMI: www. justice.gov