“I Crashed my Airplane” - What can we learn from this? Trevor Jacob React

hi everybody and very welcome to mentor now yet another video podcast as always i hope you're doing absolutely fantastic so today on the video react video to the trevor jacobs crash video for those of you who doesn't know what this is all about i was contacted about three weeks ago by a lawyer who said have you seen this video clip of this guy who seems to be committing insurance fraud by crashing his aircraft and i said no please show me and i had a look at this video okay initially i thought this is not really for me um i'm not really a general aviation expert it's a long time since i flew single pilot single engine myself so other people can do this much better but then i was contacted by so many of you guys and i did a poll on the mentor pilot social page and more than 10 000 people asked me to please say something about this so i will so what we're talking about here is a youtuber by the name of trevor jacobs he is an ex-pro snowboarder he was actually competing in the 2014 olympic games but after that he has become kind of a professional adventurer with his own website and his own youtube channel where he uploads all kinds of stunts where he's paragliding and things like that on the 25th of december he uploaded this video which is called i crashed my aircraft by trevor jacobs and what he is explaining is basically how he is flying up over a mountainous area his single engine aircraft gets an engine failure and he decides to parachute out of it this really caught the attention of the aviation world all of you guys who are passionate about how to do things right in aviation started looking at this and started scrutinizing and saying that this does not make any kind of sense right there's all kinds of wrong in here so basically everyone from batman and his mother-in-law has made a reaction video on this i'm probably the last one to do it but i really wanted to point out a few of the learning details in here i'm not going to go in and judge this guy right i'll leave that up to you and up to the faa and up to any criminal investigation that he might be involved in but what i want to do is i want to use this as a cautionary tale to show you guys what you should be doing if you find yourself in a situation like this and what you should not be doing so this slide takes place between lompoc airport in california he's supposed to fly to mammoth which is up in the mountains in california as well in the united states and he's flying his recently purchased 1940s taylor craft aircraft so beautiful tail dragger aircraft high winged and you can see it here in the background wooden propeller it's a very very simple aircraft it doesn't even have an electrical system at least not in the original fitting which means that it's likely that he doesn't even have radio unless he has retrofitted it with some kind of battery but anyway let's let's have a look at what we can see here he's wearing a full parachuting rig and you might think that that's a little bit odd but he's been saying in interviews and so on that he was doing that because he had a friend who had an accident over a mountainous terrain in a single-ending aircraft and he wants to have a way out which kind of makes sense let's have a look okay so the first couple of things that you can see here and i've gotten a lot of questions about this the amount of gopro video cameras that he has on here so he has one here in the back he obviously has one windshield which is the one we're looking from at the moment and then he has uh one out at least i think it's actually two of them out on the left hand wing and one on the stabilizer i don't really see that as anything weird because a lot of youtubers out there have their own aircraft and they've fitted gopro cameras on them they want to take cool shots for their youtube videos perfectly understandable so that in itself is not weird but what i do want to have a look at is this contraption here that's the fuel selector does not look factory fitted and the fact is that when i've been reading up and researching for this video i've been reading through some of the local newspapers and it said in there and i'll link to it down here that um trevor bought this aircraft from its previous owner very cheap because the previous owner was basically selling it as scrap as used for spare parts it was not in a good condition and that trevor was himself working on the aircraft prior to this flight now unless he changed this into an experimental aircraft he's not allowed to be working on you need to be a licensed aircraft engineer mechanic to do so and this jerry rigging here definitely does not seem like something that will be factory fitted okay so he's clearly climbing continuously and that makes sense he's going to fly out over los padres international park that has a lot of high mountains i think the minimum sector altitude is about 9000 feet in that area so he needs to get up quite high but part of your planning if you're going to do a flight like this over mountainous terrain is to plan your route so that there are places that you can land on if you need to that's that's really really important and as you can see from the area he is now there's a lot of flat terrain below him but he's about to get up over the mountains here very soon so now it looks like he has reached his about this cruising level maybe around 9000 feet or so and 10 000 feet and from that level an aircraft like this maybe has a glide ratio of about eight to ten so it means for every meter that you fall down you go about eight to ten meters forward so you have a lot of time and a lot of range from this altitude there you know to look for a field in case you would lose your engine so here's the next kind of thing that people have been talking about here and that you can see when the engine failure occurs you can see that the engine stops pulling the aircraft forward and it kind of wiggles a little bit that's when it stops working after that it's just wind milling in the air and already at that point you can also see that the door is a little bit open and people are important to that like it looks like he's prepared for this but it doesn't need to be that way we don't know how he has been cutting this it's a possibility that he's had problems with the engine for a few minutes or so and that he's opened it as a precaution i'm not saying that's the case i'm saying that there is a possibility that that it is that way because we don't know how he has been cut in the video now what what i am seeing here though is something which is a little bit weird which is how he's pumping the controls generally speaking if you do have an engine failure on a single engine aircraft you don't pump the control you don't you know try to get the nose up instead you want to get the nose down and you want to achieve the speed for best glide angle that's the speed where you'll be able to reach the furthest you know you'll be able to reach as far as the aircraft can possibly go to be able to find a suitable landing spot and that's what you should be doing you should be achieving that speed and looking for a place where you can put this aircraft down safely but by pulling it like this the speed is now decreasing and the only idea that i can have for him doing that is to get the propeller to stop windmilling for you know effects for the video basically i'm over the mountain did i get out of the engine out [Music] okay so what we're seeing now this is pure drama this is pure hollywood okay because he's clearly had the uh sense to take his gopro camera up that is his head and held the gopro camera you can see that on the video and then he is you know pretending basically that he's in full-blown panic here and he doesn't know what to do but if you have the frame of mind to get your camera up and start filming yourself you're probably not that stressed in reality so i don't buy this part of it for a second what would have been really interesting to see here is that camera the gopro that he has behind him which is filming up towards the engine instrumentation because what you really want to know here is what happened why did the engine stop engines tend to give a little bit of warning before they stop you know the oil pressure might go the temperature must start rising things like that so generally it doesn't just stop from nowhere and i am guessing that the faa is going to want to see that footage as well now you can actually see here as well which is interesting you see how he's slumped forward this is one of the reasons why you don't really want to travel fly with a full parachuting rig on because it's quite big so it's going to be really uncomfortable to sit and fly that way now i want to take this opportunity as well to point out for those of you who are asking like well you know isn't this a great idea to have a parachute with you i would there are some pilots that will carry parachutes all right it's typically glider pilots aerobatic pilots fighter pilots the reason they are flying with parachutes it's not so that at the first sight of any kind of problem they will jump out the aircraft no it's because they might for example gliders they're normally flying quite a lot of them under maybe the same updraft so there is a risk that they might fly into each other to have an in-flight collision and if that happens then the aircraft might not be airborne anymore so they might need a parachute to jump out safely the same thing goes for aerobatic pilots if they were doing aerobatics and for some reason they're overstressing the aircraft there might be a structural failure of the wing for example and then they have to jump out very similar to what happens to a fighter pilot so what i want to point out is that those parachutes that they are carrying they are for catastrophic situations only and also they only have these emergency parachutes the small ones they only have one chute generally they're the brown type very hard to maneuver not a parachuting rig like this so before he jumps out now let's discuss a little bit what you should be doing if you have an engine failure so if you're in a single engine aircraft like this you're at 9000 feet the aircraft suddenly stops we've already talked about the first thing that you should do which is to trim the aircraft for the best glide speed and then you should be looking out for places to put the aircraft down on that's aviate navigate okay so that's the first things and once you've done that and you've found a place that all right that looks good i'm going to start heading over there then the next thing you want to do is you want to try to restart the engine it makes sense doesn't it like if you can manage to get the engines restarted you don't have a problem anymore you can maybe go on land at the close airport nearby to have a technician to look at the aircraft the way that you tend to do this is that you go through the most likely reasons for the engine failure so that's potentially to put the mixture full rich that's to make sure that the engine gets as much fuel as it can the next step is possibly to check the magnetos maybe the sparks are not working inside the spark plug so you want to switch it over to the remaining magneto to see if that manages to start the engine up next thing is you know carburetor heat on so that you utilize the heat of the engine to potentially melt off any ice that has formed inside and then you want to switch between fuel tanks if you have many fuel tanks you switch from one to the other maybe you have forgotten to switch it over and you've run dry in one tank so you want to go over to the other and any of these things might get the engine to start again so that's the next thing you want to do if that fails well then the next thing you want to do is you want to call out a mayday call one to one the small five or your current frequency tell them where you are so that they can start sending out rescue but as i said it's possible that this craft didn't even have a radio on board but then after that you just continue to fly this aircraft right the aircraft flies beautifully right it does not fall straight down or some people think it will fly nicely and you'll have plenty of spaces i saw there was a riverbed down here has a lot of flat areas and remember this is a tail dragger aircraft the main gear here is very sturdy it's made to do off-field landing so there's all possibilities to land this aircraft successfully even with the engine not working [Music] and there he jumps out so effectively this is where he stops aviating now he's left this aircraft to its own accord right it's gonna go and do whatever it does one thing that i do notice though and that pilot blog another youtuber pointed out is that as soon as he lets go of the yolk the aircraft pitches forward that indicates that it's trimmed forward all right and that's a very strange way of flying an aircraft normally you trim the aircraft to fly wings level because that means the less work for you if you have it trimmed forward it means that it's constantly wanting to dip the nose and you constantly have to hold against it that is a really really weird way of flying and there's no real reason why you should have it trimmed forward unless you want it to tip down as you leave the aircraft another thing that i just love with internet community is that because there's been a lot of controversy around this video we have this community of internet salutes that have gone through this video frame by frame to look for strange things and just a few days ago they figured out that this looked weird right his his pant legs they don't look right so they started going through this part of the video but also his free fall and they realized that it looks like he has a pressurized container of some sort strapped to his leg under his pants now you can have a pressurized container for many reasons well can you really well anyway but one of them is that there is a fire extinguisher there right and now i want to hear from you why do you think that anyone would have a concealed fire extinguisher struck to the legs i'd love to hear your comments down here below the video i'll see if i can find a better frame in a second yeah so here you can actually see the the red color of the uh of the fire extinguisher and then let's see if we go a little bit further over here you can also see it and you can actually see the uh the pressure gauge and the the kind of tip of the extinguisher there as well so it's all very very strange and this is going to be hard for him to explain to the faa later on okay so here well it's losing part of his headset but we can also see that there's a valley here where a lot of nice flat terrain which this small tailorcraft could easily land on like there are several parts over here and behind him that he could go on but also crucially it's a nice place for him to land with his parachute right you know he's a professional at this he should want to go as close to civilization as possible or close the road as possible for him to you know maximize his chances of survival but curiously that's not really what happens so he's free falling for a long time here and that could be because he wants to get away from the aircraft if the aircraft starts circling back it could potentially hit him but it's also a little bit strange because he knows that the higher up he you know gets his parachute out the more choices he has you know the further he can go with this parachute because it's a real parachute and rig here he can control it so he can go further out closer to civilization it doesn't do that see this aircraft is flying beautifully by itself actually it almost looks like it's trying to make an emergency landing and you can also see that it's clearly wind milling the propeller now as soon as you let it go the speed started rising again the propeller started wind milling and if it would have fuel or the ignition on it could potentially start here and the engine could start working again here we can also see that the aircraft is now entering into what looks like its final turn and we have this mountain up here which has a bald spot on top of it so that makes it fairly easy to see where the aircraft is actually about to impact so this is now trevor coming in with his parachute okay and you can see that up here you have the same mountain so this means that the aircraft is coming somewhere around here to crash so once again i would ask myself first of all there's a nice clear area down here which doesn't have any brushes on it if if i was professional parachutes then i was in this situation i would probably aim for some around there but also why isn't he going down into the valley why is he going so close to where the aircraft touches down [Music] i guess i should probably document what's going on all of this with a firm grip of his gopro camera got my elbow now comes probably my my you know the part of the video that i have the most objections to i'm just so happy to be alive i'm just kind of taking in what just happened well where the hell am i going to land a freaking plane i'm going to die that's why i always freaking fly with a parachute so what he's saying here is basically you should always fly with the parachute so that when you're in a tricky situation like this you can just jump out which is counter to anything that any cfi would ever teach a ppl student right like i said before the training that is given to new pilots that's going to fly this type of aircraft is to take care of its aircraft right aviate navigate communicate and do it in that order continue to fly your aircraft you are the commander of the aircraft right you want to make sure that that aircraft comes down in one piece together with you and that it doesn't cause any third-party damage so what he is saying here is goes against everything that trained um flight instructors would tell their students to do and that's something that that you know i take strong opposition to now after this follows a kind of a really poor bear grylls imitation where he's going through the scrub and he is drinking water from a stream and then eventually he gets to the aircraft there's literally nothing no anything no water i had a water jug in the back oh my gosh dude so this part of the video he clearly just goes through the wreckage here and he collects his gopros so he could make this awesome video for youtube later on um and then he leaves the aircraft and he tracks down to eventually find a road where just out of coincidence a few farmers picks him up later on and towards the end of the video he then ends up in mammoth and he's spreading the ashes of his friend and he's doing some paragliding interestingly enough with the paraglider and the snowboard that you should have had in this aircraft but maybe that was shot at a different time i don't know it's possible that those are some of the controversies around this video and believe me there's been a mountain of other youtubers that have covered this i loved the video from trent palmer moji grip has done a really good one as well uh pilot blog like i mentioned before and scooby 1961. just a few of the channels that have already done some great reporting on this video now i what i want to talk about a little bit is about how the faa might be handling this case so this already been an faa investigation launched into this case and as any government entity by the way i'm not talking behalf of them they will go through this from the very beginning so they are likely going to ask for you know the technical status of the aircraft to see any log books there are they are going to ask for the original from all of the gopro cameras they're going to look at this video which is now in thousand different places over youtube and they're going to go through this dissecting it bit by bit and if you remember the movie sully where jeff skyles and sully sullenberger had to stand in front of the ntsb and the fa and defend their actions and the decision they took well that's going to happen to trevor as well you know he the the burden of evidence falls on him as the commander of the aircraft so he is going to have to explain all of these discrepancies to the fea and then the fa is going to make a final decision of what to do and that might include him losing his licenses it might also include some quite severe fines but they're not going to put him in prison i've seen so many comments saying that he should go to prison and yada yada that's not going to happen from the fva there might be other people who launches criminal investigations into this if the fva and i say if they find that he did this voluntarily that he crashed this aircraft on purpose well then there might be others like i think that he crashed this aircraft in a national park which is very very sensitive to forest fires it's a condor reserve as well so it's a condor habitat so there might be other entities that launches criminal investigations into this and that might lead to more severe punishment but the fea they're just going to be able to rip his license potentially and give him some fines about it and that's going to happen in you know a year's time or maybe more than that it takes a long time for the fva to go through these things lastly i just want to say a few words as a fellow content creator and youtuber and that is with great reach comes great responsibility you have to understand that when you make a video like this that's going to reach hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people you have to make sure that whatever message that you have in your video is clear and true and it teaches something to your audience so i don't know if this is true i don't know if trevor jacobs actually had an engine failure and he chose to jump out but if he did that he needs to cut the video in a way that shows what you're supposed to do why it happened and so on if you do something that is just pure fiction that has to be clearly understood by the people because otherwise you might find yourself in a situation where people watch this there's some private pilot student out there who thinks that wow that's a great idea i'm going to get myself a parachute and then they go out flying on a solo trip they have some problem with the engine and they thought i'm gonna jump out just like trevor jacobs did they jump out the aircraft continues to fly and it crashes into a village into a house it creates huge third-party damage or the person that jumps out is not a professional skydiver so they manage to not get the parachute working properly and they kill themselves that is a very real potential when you do a video like this so make sure that you do the videos ethically and that you teach your audience something it has to be both positive and constructive that's what i always try to do on my videos and i hope that you got a little bit of that out of this video as well that's it guys i hope you enjoyed this make sure that you tell me what you think in the comments below have an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 493,492

Keywords: mentour pilot, mentour, aviation, general aviation, trevor jacob plane crash, trevor jacob fake plane crash, trevor jacob we have some questions, california, taylor aircraft, air crash, fire extinguisher, criminal, stupid, stunt, glider, crime, federal aviation administration, faa, explained, analysis, liar, education, epic fail, concealed, go pro, dude jumps from plane

Id: 7PgGvl2ZMFs

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022