A YouTuber and former Olympian plans to plead guilty to a federal charge after he admitted that he crashed his airplane into California’s Los Padres National Forest in 2021 to get views online, according to the Department of Justice.
Trevor Daniel Jacob, 29, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, authorities said Thursday in a news release. He competed in snowboarding at the 2014 Winter Olympics, according to People.
In a plea agreement filed Wednesday in federal court, authorities described Jacob as “an experienced pilot and sky diver.” He took off from Lompoc City Airport in his Taylorcraft BL-65 airplane on Nov. 24, 2021, on a solo flight purportedly bound for Mammoth Lakes, but officials said Jacob never intended to reach his destination. Instead, he “planned to eject from his airplane during the flight and to video himself parachuting to the ground and his airplane as it descended and crashed,” court records show.
Before leaving Lompoc City Airport, authorities said Jacob mounted several cameras onto his airplane and equipped himself with a parachute, a video camera and a selfie stick. About 35 minutes after takeoff, he parachuted out of the plane, recording himself all the while. He hiked back to the site of the wreck to get videos of the crash that had been recorded by the cameras mounted on the plane, officials said.
Two days later, Jacob reported the crash to the National Transportation Safety Board, prompting an investigation. The Federal Aviation Administration launched its own investigation on Nov. 29, 2021.
Officials with the NTSB told Jacob that their focus would first be on finding the location where the wreckage went down. Authorities said he lied to an NTSB investigator, claiming that he did not know where the plane wrecked even though he had hired a helicopter to retrieve the wreckage in December 2021.
Later, he “cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage and, over the course of a few days, deposited the detached parts of the wrecked aircraft into trash receptacles at (Lompoc City Airport) and elsewhere,” according to court records.
Authorities said Jacob destroyed the wreckage to keep officials with the NTSB and the FAA from being able to inspect it.
In a report submitted to the NTSB, Jacob falsely claimed that he had experienced a full loss of power about 35 minutes after taking off, officials said. He also claimed that he had parachuted out of his plane because he couldn’t find any safe places to land.
Authorities said Jacob “knowingly made those false statements in order to conceal the fact that he had purposely abandoned his airplane in flight as part of his scheme to create a video to gain notoriety and make money.”
Before his November 2021 flight, authorities said Jacob agreed to promote an unidentified company’s wallet as part of a sponsorship deal. He “intended to make money by promoting the wallet in the video that would depict, among other things, (Jacob) parachuting from the airplane, and the airplane descending and crashing.” He posted the video, titled “I Crashed My Airplane,” on YouTube on Dec. 24, 2021.
As of Friday, the video has gotten more than 3.4 million views.
The FAA revoked Jacob’s pilot license in April 2022.
He is expected to make his initial court appearance in the coming weeks.
