Prosecutors said Trevor Jacob deliberately crashed his plane “to gain online views… [for] financial gain.”
A California pilot who pled guilty to obstruction after deliberately crashing his plane says he made a “massive mistake.”
“It has destroyed me. I am now a convicted felon,” the pilot tells Inside Edition.
Trevor Jacob caught a mid-flight engine failure on camera. He bailed out of the plane with a camera recording the incident. Jacob used a selfie stick to record his parachute descent.
The pilot recounted the entire story about the crash in a 16-minute video which he posted on YouTube. But people grew skeptical.
A federal investigation was launched and Jacobs was charged with deliberately crashing the plane “to gain online views… [for] financial gain.”
“It was more of a byproduct of a stunt that I had an idea to do as a little kid,” Jacob says. “And that led to a chain of mistakes and bad decisions.”
Two weeks after the crash, with the investigation underway, Jacob returned to the crash site and lifted the wreckage out with a helicopter. He took the wreckage to a hanger where he chopped it up and disposed of the pieces.
“I took some poor legal advice to go remove the wreckage,” Jacob says. “I’ve learned from my mistakes massively.”
Jacob pled guilty to obstruction. The 30-year-old is to begin a six-month prison term later this month.
Jacob has this message for people trying to make viral videos: “You can’t just do whatever you want and think you’re going to get away with it and there’s no repercussions for your actions,” he says.
The Federal Aviation Administration revoked Jacob’s pilot license in 2022 but he has since gotten it back.
