A former Olympic snowboarder turned YouTuber has admitted to purposely crashing a plane for views on his channel and could face up to 20 years behind bars. Trevor Jacob has more than 140,000 subscribers and believed that causing the accident would help him go viral. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge this week.
In a video titled “I Crashed My Plane,” Jacob dives out of the civilian plane and opened a parachute. He claimed the escape was necessary as the aircraft had malfunctioned over Los Padres National Forest. However, it wasn’t long before people started calling out “odd” details from the clip, including the fact that Trevor Jacob was wearing a parachute.
At no point did Jacob attempt to contact air traffic control, nor did he try to glide safely to one of the many landing sites in the area. After the crash, he “recovered and then disposed of the wreckage,” the FAA says. He hired a helicopter to lift and move it to Rancho Sisquoc in Santa Barbara County where he then loaded it onto his pickup truck.
“Jacob drove the wreckage to Lompoc City Airport and unloaded it in a hangar,” the Department “of Justice said. “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.”
The Justice Department had been investigating the December 2021 crash for a while, believing it to have been staged by Jacob for views. On Thursday, it announced that a plea agreement had been filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles in the case.
Per the statement: “Trevor Daniel Jacob, 29, of Lompoc, agreed to plead guilty to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, a crime that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.”
Trevor Jacob’s sentencing date for his intentional plane crash has not been made public.
