A pilot {and professional} YouTuber has run into some hassle after he crashed his aircraft within the California mountains final month, solely to be accused of doing the entire thing on objective to seize some web page views. Now he’s being investigated by the feds.

Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned social media star, not too long ago crashed a Taylorcraft BL64 aircraft into the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest, filming all the episode because it occurred, The Drive reviews. Jacob, who has been making YouTube movies for awhile, has claimed that he was en route from Lompoc City Airport in Santa Barbara to Mammoth Lakes (a Sierra Nevada snowboarding city) when the aircraft randomly stalled out, forcing him to desert it. When he escaped, Jacob notably pitched the aircraft nose-down, forcing it on a vertical trajectory into the wilderness, earlier than leaping out with a parachute.

A 17-minute video uploaded to Jacob’s YouTube web page, titled “I Crashed My Plane,” captures this whole escapade: from a sunny takeoff, to Jacob’s realization that the aircraft is in hassle, to his dive out of the aircraft door and the discharge of his parachute.

With the assistance of a selfie stick and plane-mounted cameras, we see Jacob plummet via the air, whereas the doomed plane descends decrease and decrease—lastly barreling into the facet of a hill. Jacob is then pressured to hike via the wilderness till he’s picked up by somebody in a truck (Jacob claims this man was “a farmer”). The video netted Jacob greater than a million web page views.

However, it didn’t take lengthy for the web to develop into suspicious of Jacob’s narrative, and YouTube has since develop into populated with movies critiquing the pilot’s story. Aviation professionals have questioned a lot of Jacob’s selections throughout the flight. For occasion, the necessity to soar from the aircraft appeared suspect to one expert, who provided that the car might have been piloted for an additional 15 to twenty miles. In the video, Jacob additionally makes the declare that he “always” flies with a parachute; this declare was subsequently debunked by a variety of viewers who famous that, in actual fact, he isn’t sporting a parachute in most of his movies and that to take action isn’t significantly frequent for small-plane pilots, as there’s often not sufficient room.

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To make issues extra attention-grabbing, the Federal Aviation Administration is now investigating the crash, reports aviation site AVweb. “The FAA is investigating this event,” the company informed the outlet on Monday, whereas declining to remark additional. While there’s not a lot to go off there, an intensive investigation by federal officers ought to be capable to inform whether or not a aircraft malfunctioned or was deliberately sabotaged not directly.

Ultimately, Jacob is both an harmless man who fairly amazingly survived an wild aircraft crash and is now being unfairly pilloried by a paranoid YouTube mob, or he’s a social media influencer doing what influencers do: pull sensationalistic stunts to seize consideration and watch the views roll in.

Adding gasoline to the fireplace is the truth that Jacob really isn’t the primary influencer pilot to get accused of faking a aircraft crash. A few years in the past, David Lesh, a former professional skier and the proprietor of a Colorado sportswear firm, was piloting a plane close to Half Moon Bay in northern California when the engine allegedly stalled, forcing him to conduct an emergency water touchdown. The incontrovertible fact that the entire thing was filmed and later uploaded to YouTube led many to consider that Lesh had staged the crash to garner attention for his enterprise.