It's really transparent to anyone who's flown. He spends no time debugging, no time communicating, no time looking for somewhere to land. He had a lot of altitude and his immediate thought was "Oh ok I guess it's broken, seeeeyaaaaa".
Amongst all the other callouts, like why a parachute, why so many cameras strapped up, some timeline incongruities, some camera shot incongruities. His flight path made no sense. It was well executed enough to trick your regular view I'm sure, but it did not stand up to scrutiny, and you better believe the FAA was going to scrutinize.
It was really obvious to me as someone who hasn't flown, even. As a layman it was obvious there would be at least a checklist of things you'd try first.
Like to get the engine running again, figure out if there's anywhere close enough to land/ditch safely, radio ATC, etcetera. And he didn't appear surprised or stressed out, he looked like he was expecting it.
Plus having the parachute on in advance, and so many cameras?
But this guy? This guy just pressed triangle and immediately pulled a full on GTA-V move.
Also pretty obvious that this guy is no outdoorsman. He complains about not being able to get signal so he can call 911, but then he walks down a ravine and then down a dry river bed. In that situation, you need to climb UP, not down, and get as much elevation and clearance as possible.
Fun factoid: one of the cornerstone references for search-and-rescue planning is a reference work called "Lost Person Behavior"[1] ... it has empirical data on how people tend to behave in various situations based on categorization of their circumstances.
For example, despondent people have historically tended to behave differently from those suffering dementia or lost hikers or plane crash survivors.
The text includes statistical data on where lost people have been found relative to the initial planning point for a search (e.g. last known point) - how far away, what type of terrain, whether they tend to go uphill or downhill etc.
One of the largest step-changes in lost person behavior came with the general adoption of the cellphone: many, many people now tend to go uphill than before - specifically in the hope of finding cellphone coverage.
>One of the largest step-changes in lost person behavior came with the general adoption of the cellphone: many, many people now tend to go uphill than before - specifically in the hope of finding cellphone coverage.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Historically, it was pretty situational if you should stay put and make yourself safe and visible to rescuers or if you should try to self-rescue. But my sense is today the general impulse is to call for rescue--with the caveat that many of the places people are most likely to get in trouble are the least likely to have cell phone reception.
If you get high enough, in many places you’ll eventually hit line of sight to at least some cell tower. I’ve gone deep into wilderness areas and it isn’t uncommon to get cell coverage somewhere on a ridge line or mountain peak. Often strong enough that you can hit Facebook, upload pictures, download offline maps, or even videos.
Can confirm. In general, Death Valley has no signal. However, when my wife and I biked from saline valley to racetrack valley up the Lippincott road, we kept finding little spots of reasonably strong cell signal - enough that we were able to wait here: 8584JCR4+6C and get enough signal to download a new audiobook.
Our whole time left in DV, we never found any other reliably strong signal.
As of a few years ago Furnace Creek had cell service (it didn't used to) but Death Valley as a whole doesn't have much coverage. You were presumably seeing a tower somewhere in the mountains west of Death Valley.
Headed downhill into a ravine might make sense if you're looking for water (water flows down, after all).
I'm mildly amused that we have trained ourselves into anti-survival behaviors- head uphill where there is less water, more exposure to elements, etc. (of course, being uphill might make you more visible, but that's assuming anyone is coming anytime immediately soon)
I've seen a lot of near-accident videos and they all show the initiation of the accident sequence and allow you to step through the process the PIC went through to either _cause_ and/or _get out of_ the incident. This video had none of those qualities. Trim for best glide speed? Nope. Head on a swivel looking for suitable alternates? Nope. The performative display of pumping the yoke? Engine is out and the pilot is trying to do what? Precipitate an aerodynamic stall?
I can think of very few disciplines that are more contradictory than the juxtaposition of aviation with the "influencer"/social media spectrum. Hopefully the FAA revocation of his certificate paves the way for law enforcement to look into fraud and other issues.
Exactly! I wonder why he didn't at least act like he ran out of options before bailing out. "OK, there's an airport over there." <banks slightly> "Oh crap, I'm losing too much altitude! I'll never make it! Time to bail out! Buy a Ridge Wallet!"
> He spends no time debugging, no time communicating, no time looking for somewhere to land.
Yup. He spent most of his time doing absolutely nothing, just maintaining back-pressure on the yoke and holding the aircraft in the stall.
I suppose at least he was lucky enough to pick an aircraft with docile stall characteristics. Somehow he does not strike me as the sort of person who could manage to recover from a wing-drop and induced spin.
Frankly shame on YouTube for allowing the video to remain on their platform
> Frankly shame on YouTube for allowing the video to remain on their platform
I was nodding until this bit... why do you think YouTube should censor this? It's a real video of a real thing that he did (which he misrepresents the circumstances of). I could possibly get on board with "put an explanatory note next to it" or "don't let him get ad revenue from it", but what possible reason would there be for deleting it?
It is annoying to see idiots get a lot of attention, but really, it is not a glorification of a stupid act, it is just a video of one. Furthermore, it would live on in all of those videos that point out just how stupid it was, unless Youtube also removes those - but they are informative, I would say.
I'm generally in favor of idiots that do illegal things then posting video evidence of them online. I don't think it glorifies the act if YouTube then demonetized the video with a note & link back to the FAA's ruling. Showing stupid things & their consequences seems reasonable.
Would you feel the same if this became the top watched video for weeks, with a lively comment section mostly leaning towards "omg that is so cool! I want to top this!!!"?
I wouldn't - which is why I don't mind if it's taken down.
I'm hesitant to advocate taking something down. I'm not saying it should never happen, but this doesn't cross the threshold for me. In this instance the video creator wasn't encouraging people to do this and the audience response wasn't to jump in and do the same thing. Also videos that would fit this category-- filmed evidence of illegal activity & subsequent consequences (which I think Google should add to the video)-- are not likely to become popular in the thought experiment you describe. If they did, maybe I'd revisit my opinion.
On the other hand, if content is encouraging people to do harmful or dangerous things then that becomes a different issue. I'm less uncomfortable with YouTube trying to stop Tide Pod Challenge videos which were basically encouraging such activity: The first two weeks of 2018 saw about as many poisoning reports from this as most entire years before then. [1]
What glorification? This is a thing that happened, and it's incredibly newsworthy. Prevent him from profiting off the video and leave it up. There is no reason to do anything further from YouTube's perspective.
How is "treat this video like any other video" (i.e. do nothing) a "glorification"? There are tons of videos of incredibly stupid and dangerous acts on YouTube.
But why would YouTube want to do that? What he did is obviously wrong, dangerous, and stupid, but still I see no reason from YouTube's side to remove the video.
Perhaps they would remove it if they are concerned their platform could be incentivizing wrong, dangerous or stupid behavior and they worry about the brand damage that does or have ethical problems profiting off that.
This is what I was thinking. I didn't find the video here on HN. A few weeks ago my 11 year old son told me about it. Like a lot of kids his age, becoming a YouTuber is aspirational, and his reaction was "that is crazy" but it was also "this guy just raised the ante on Mr. Beast." It's only going to make some YouTubers try to top it with some kind of dangerous Johnny Knoxville-type stunt.
"Wrong" = criminal (?) maybe. Though this guy hasn't actually been prosecuted and may well never be.
But if you're going to ban dangerous/stupid video someone has to make that determination. And you can be sure that there are a ton of activities that are dangerous/stupid in the eyes of some people (even understandably so). BASE jumping, wingsuits, really any kind of extreme sports, stuff with explosives, etc.
> It's only going to make some YouTubers try to top it with some kind of dangerous Johnny Knoxville-type stunt.
People were doing stupid stuff before YouTube existed. As long as it's legal (which this stunt was not) who cares? Teach your son why he shouldn't do that kind of stuff instead of turning to censorship.
Nowhere did I advocate censorship. But I do think it should be illegal because this stunt could have started a wildfire if the plane had started burning.
> he was lucky enough to pick an aircraft with docile stall characteristics
Evidence suggests he may have bought the plane explicitly for this stunt. He's an experienced sky diver, so I imagine he knows what kind of plane is good for a pilot looking to bail.
> he had a fire extinguisher concealed under his pants right above his ankle.
This was also something I just learned about the incident an hour ago, and in fact he has a fire extinguisher on both legs, which are relatively evident in his video:
I think he probably has them for just that reason - to put out any fire his crash might start. He knew there is massive, massive liability and jail time for deliberately doing something that causes a fire and can potentially destroy miles of trees, homes, and people.
Alternatively, he could have been thinking about his next hit YouTube video already, titled "See, this is why I always jump with two fire extinguishers on me!".
It's unlikely that you'd land near your crashed plane if you jumped out of it while it still had enough altitude for your parachute to work. By the time you got to your plane, if a fire were going to get big, it already would have.
One of the things I was most impressed by was how he managed to aim for some camera worthy bushes to land in when there were SO many better options for safety.
I wasted an inordinate amount of time analysing the whole thing myself, including but not limited to finding the location based on geographic features - and then testing in Flight Simulator.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.
I'm disappointed he's not thrown in jail for reckless endangerment.
There was for a time a micro-industry of people taking flights to this location on Youtube -- it's one of the most fun examples of this that I've seen.
And yeah; really quickly people discovered that he genuinely had options.
There is a question I've not seen answered yet. Did the wallet guys know he was doing this in advance?
Unlikely. What most YouTubers call "sponsors" they have instead signed up to be an affiliate for using an online form. He likely broke the conditions for which the affiliate link/code could be used, which could have been the reason he removed that section from the video.
He also removed the ending, and both the beginning and ending were the pretext for the flight – bringing his friends ashes in a used sandwich bag to be scattered in the mountains, so could have instead been removed to reduce the cheese factor.
I’ve seen speculation that he shot those “plane spiraling below me” money shots separately. Sadly I don’t have the time to find the YouTuber’s videos who made the claim.
…suffice to say lots of people have gone through his video frame by frame to find weird stuff.
Well, sure, that's where the lack of critical thinking skills comes in.
Though, de'd still probably get there before it spread to miles and miles...he just wouldn't have had much impact when he did even if it was only a few dozen yards in size.
The first thing he did after landing was head to the crash site. Not saying he could have actually stopped a forest blaze with fire extinguishers (it's not like wildland firefighters use them) but that might have been what he had planned.
It appears that he actually made a ton of effort to prevent a fire from erupting from the crashed plane, which is really, ironically, the smoking gun that this was a planned crash.
For instance, the apparent reason why the engine stopped working isn't due to mechanical failure of the engine (very common in old ass prop planes, just as your Hyundai might blow up, due to oil starvation, spun bearings, rods grenading itself, etc), but rather running out of fuel. He purposefully brought not enough fuel to kill the engine, and secondarily prevent a fire. It was also strongly speculated that he filled one of the fuel tanks with water, probably in an attempt to prevent a fire from erupting.
> ...isn't due to mechanical failure of the engine (very common in old ass prop planes, just as your Hyundai might blow up, due to oil starvation, spun bearings, rods grenading itself, etc)
Unlike cars, even old aviation engines have strict rules for inspection, and for replacement of parts after a certain number of hours, rather than when they wear out or fail. You could get away with circumventing these for a while, but it is simply not true that it is "very common" for "old ass prop planes" to have engine failures, comparably to old cars.
> It was also strongly speculated that he filled one of the fuel tanks with water...
I would be interested in seeing how strong the evidence behind this speculation is, but if it were the case, it would be yet further evidence of his incompetence, as water is no help, and sometimes a problem, in preventing, containing and extinguishing a gasoline fire.
A tank full of gas won't explode if punctured, but there might be a fire if it leaks near something hot enough. An empty tank will explode with just the slightest spark. A half tank just depends on where it gets punctured, but with gravity and all, it's likely to be the bottom half that gets punctured.
Cars use in-tank pumps turned by brushed electric motors. Why don't they blow up when empty?
Even in an empty fuel tank the vapors are way to rich to ignite. You might get a good flash if you introduce air and ignition at the same time but odds are you won't get any sort of sustained fire.
And are placed somewhere completely else on Swedish keyboards but it was an Aha-moment when I realized as a child that the keys ,. was really supposed to be <> for arrows in some games 30+ years ago :-)
I remember the first time I absentmindedly pressed . or , on YouTube and was shocked that they used MPlayer's keybindings (and implemented such an obscure, but useful, feature). Oddly probably the least copied feature across video platforms, I like it a lot, but nobody else seems to have stolen it. (Can anyone believe that Twitch has gotten away with such a terrible player? I remember people used to send streamers Twitch VODs to review, and every time they paused the video gets greyed out. Twitch never changed this, and now people use YouTube for that.)
The joke is more that "you have amazing eyes" more means "you have beautiful eyes", at least in British English. "you have excellent eyes" would be how I'd comment on someone's eyesight.
Hah, I must admit that I didn't catch it the previous times I watched the video when I heard about the incident; It wasn't until I learned he had extinguishers strapped to the back of his legs that I went hunting for them in the video.
Even knowing what I was looking for I had to do frame-by-frame a couple of times before spotting them, and once you see them it's obvious but to spot them not knowing they are there is quite a feat.
If you search YouTube for “Trevor Jacob” there is several pilot folks who have spent tons of time going through every little detail of the video. They’ve reconstructed the flight path, where it landed, you name it. It was one of those “hive mind” kind of deals and it was fun to follow during the month or so after the original video was posted.
Does ublock somehow stops view counts? Or are you strictly talking about monetization? Even though I don't care about adding views, that might make youtube recommend his videos further. He's probably on some kind of shadowban at this point, though.
For anyone else like me who was curious as to the utility of having a fire extinguisher on one's person when deliberately crashing the plane, the speculation is that
1. It would be useful to fight fire at the wreckage if attempting a recovery of the go-pro footage from the plane
2. To limit a bush fire from spreading (and national park blowback) around the wreckage, although those tiny extinguishers would probably do diddly-squat if a bush fire actually started
Which, by the way, is another incongruity. The dude had a highly maneuverable parachute and yet somehow lands in a bunch of prickly bushes. He had ample time to find a much better landing site that would ensure a speedy recovery.
I do but this account has come to my attention a couple of times by now and I'm considering pinging a higher power.
"Better to use the extinguishers as extra thrust for a wing suit." does not read like something a reasonable person would inject as a contribution to the conversation.
...Legally speaking, that would not be the case, as you're giving the prosecution ammo for proving premeditation.
Someone who actually just had something happen to them probably would not be carrying two fire extinguishers that they suddenly had an epiphany and realized they could use as a thrust source.
Our legal system is absolutely perfect for ensuring that "cool" will almost always get couched as "reckless and wanton disregard". This does however, push the calculus in favor of, "if you're going to do it, get the most out of it".
I too would assume that a plane would typically crash (significantly) further away than the distance that you can typically travel in a parachute, unless it was put in a straight nosedive.
Which is something one can't guarantee from outside the plane.
Also, it's much easier to ensure a safe crash site when you're only doing the calculations in one axis, which a nose down, straight in trajectory would have offered.
I'm surprised the youtube video is still up, and has 1.7 million or more views. With that many views he's probably earned up to 5 figures of revenue from the ads and such alone. IMHO he kind of has gotten away with it--he's making money and added a ton of subscribers. Youtube should really kick him off the platform.
This guy crashed a plane for profit. The fact that US law doesn't seem to have any meaningful sanction for him is not a reason for it to stay up.
They should delete the video. And I really don't understand the argument that they shouldn't stop him using their platform; my goodness if Youtube was mine he'd be gone and I wouldn't for a second wonder if there was any meaningful free speech implication for removing it.
He is dangerous, and the allure of more views on youtube made him do a dangerous thing. I'd be like: "OK, you're not my customer anymore".
So did the Discovery channel. The only difference is that they had asked the FAA permission to do so.
This guy crashed a plane for profit without permission. This may have just been stupidity, not understanding the consequences. Loads of people also crash other vehicles for fun and profit, so why should YT distinguish between someone crashing a car vs a plane. Where should YT draw the line? They don't make the laws.
The discovery channel didn’t try to pretend it was an engine fire. They set out to plan a plane crash with the full involvement of relevant authorities.
Yes, but now the FAA has stated what we all knew already — it was dangerous stunt undertaken entirely for self-promotion. YouTube don’t have to be experts?
It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law. What next? Should they remove house flipping videos because of realtor regulations in various jurisdictions? Remove DIY videos because some jurisdictions require electrical repairs to be performed by certified technicians? The list is endless, and the precedent is so very bad.
> It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law.
This is a bit of a silly way to look at it, I'm sorry to say.
What if they just remove the video on the balance of probability that it involved, in the FAA's judgement, a deliberate dangerous plane crash without permission?
This is not a challenging precedent. House-flipping is not smashing a plane into the ground without planning and without regard for safety, is it?
What about infringement on the regulation on the handling of unsafe chemicals?
Regulations on performing archælogical excavations?
Food safety violations?
Alcohol production?
Blasphemy laws in any country Youtube might be accessed from?
Animal cruelty laws? (Are hamster wheels cruel?)
Religious laws on the consumption of cattle / pork?
Privacy laws in Germany? (Dashcams are heavily regulated there)
Is it legal to show a Nazi swastika everywhere? A non Nazi swastika? A communist symbol? What about an imperial Japanese ensign?
Is it legal to say the Armenian suffered a genocide, or to claim they didn't?
Is it legal to cast doubt on any one finding of the Nuremberg trials?
What about mentioning a crime committed by a living person more than 20 years go? (Hint: it may not be legal in some European countries. Which ones? You tell me.)
Do you think youtube should systematically go through all videos for perceived dangerous people or people who look like views might "make" them do dangerous things, or just the ones that are brought to their attention by angry mobs / report volume?
And would "dangerous" include technically legal but dangerous actions like speaking up for gay rights in Yemen or criticizing cartels in Mexico? Or would they be more limited to the youtube wrong-think-corrections officer judging the video to demonstrate outright illegal actions like protesting Putin's special operation while in Russia, or publishing documents containing evidence of western war crimes?
I would normally agree with you but I feel like there’s a moral issue with what is essentially monetizing criminal activity. At a minimum, it should be demonetized and YouTube shouldn’t show any ads either.
I guess "criminal activity" may have been the wrong phrase. "Illegal activity" is more what I meant. Because not all illegal activity is adjudicated by a court, and a regulatory action by the FAA is one of those things.
Many jurisdictions have ways to seize profits of crime, and just about all have ways to punish crime including paying fines and restitution.
Don't you think it would be better to go through a system which has (at least a semblance of) due process, fairness, and transparency about the rules? Yes yes I know I know, "they're a private company they can do what they want". I'm not wondering what they can do, more flabbergasted about the apparent sudden and large support for corporations acting to censor and punish people like this.
> This is a dangerous thought. There is already too much decision making of what is allowed on our social platform by the big corps
In this case though the FAA has made the decision, he didn't do something in bad taste - he did something that could have been very dangerous to others, could have started a major fire, and was illegal (or at least broke the FAA rules enough for him to loose his license). And the reason he did that was (almost certainly) to make a YouTube video - I think YouTube would be justified from kicking him off their platform for this.
No, but in this case it's probably certain that if he wasn't going to make a YouTube video he wouldn't have done the illegal act. It's probably something that most companies and advertisers, wouldn't want to be associated with incase they were seen to be endorsing and encouraging the act.
> YouTube should at best demonetize the video, and only if it does that consistently based on a public policy.
Exactly.
I'm generally in favour of youtube removing objectionable material, or at least corralling it somewhere as they already do with their half-assed "mature content" filter, but it absolutely must be done on a policy basis which is written down upfront and made clear to uploaders, and subject to fair reviews. Doing it on outrage based case by case basis is just enraging to all involved.
And it's not the actual content of this video which is objectionable, but the circumstances under which it was made. Possibly it contravenes UK rules on profiting from crime if it's monetized: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02...
- but (a) it's not in our jurisdiction and (b) he hasn't actually been convicted yet.
demonitization seems the best option I guess. Leave it up as a display of stupidity, and aviation history. But don't let him profit of something illegal
People write books about their past illegal exploits. Are you against people documenting their lives for profit, in-general? I don’t see the difference here except that it’s a video instead of a book.
I think the tricky part with this particular video is that the documentation (plane crash video) was the entire point of committing the act. If people were committing crimes entirely to sell tell all books or documentaries about doing it that would be a lot more sketchy.
> Youtube should really kick him off the platform.
No, a responsible behaviour is for Youtobe to purposely leave him on the platform for everybody to see what he did and the comments below the video, but cut his revenue for this video due to ToS violations. I sure the lawyers who wrote the ToS thought about something like this.
So if you are behaving obnoxiously in a private coffe shop the owners can’t ask you to leave?
Everyone is free to choose who they do business with. There are some protected categories but “people wantonly destroying airplanes for publicity and profit” is not one of them.
It can end with whatever criteria you want. I think clearly a viral video with this behavior fits the definition of something that should be taken down. It’s a guy deliberately crashing a plane for views. It’s the same thing as not publishing a mass shooter’s name. I’m sure they’re written in books somewhere, but not everything is a slippery slope to PRC censorship. It’s the process of finding the blurry line.
There have been a number of best sellers about people breaking the law in real life. No one was harmed in this case or the other case. I can't imagine someone wanting to censor this, just seems quite a bit extreme.
Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops. And, furthermore, this is not an action that the business is going to take out of their own freewill, it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage, so it's not actually YouTube choosing who they do business with, it's YOU choosing for YouTube who they do business with, but masking it as YouTube's own decisions.
I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts. I can understand calls for censoring violent crimes and even then you don't get to make this decision for other people, censoring unpleasant things doesn't make them go away.
But with dumb online posts the case just completely falls apart. "But he's going to benefit from this" ok so fucking what ? there's a whole class of people who do dumb, dangerous and harmful things for public approval and profit from it, they are called polliticans and celebrities. They routinely do unimaginabley stupid and outrageous things and profit from the publicity that comes with it. How is this any different, except that "online influencer" is a relatively new class of people unlike the other ones?
>There are some protected categories
Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like". Protected groups are arbitary and reflects lobbying and political considerations more than any moral truth. Why are some religious groups protected for instance? it's just a bunch of beliefs, they could be as wrong or as dumb as any other set of beliefs right ? they are not immutable characteristics of the people believing them. (not anymore than any other kind of beliefs)
My own personal opinion is that it's stupid to classify people as "Protected" or not, but rather any business that have reasonably-easy-to-find alternatives can do whatever the hell they like, refuse to serve customers based on skin color, gender, favorite programming language, you name it. As long as it's "easy" to find alternatives (by some objective standard the law defines, like "there's is a similar service within a 1-KM radius"), they can do whatever they like.
But for all other businesses who aren't so easy to replace, common sense morality says they should be EXTREMELY curtailed from censoring or denying *anyone* without a very good reason.
Alas, we don't live in my utopia and the laws of this time and place are extremely dumb and discriminating.
> Businesses that hold a massive and unfair effective monopoly on communication and information are different from unremarkable coffee shops.
Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.
> it's an action that you want to force on them by some mechanism of public rage
Lol. :) Public rage you say? Where is the rage? :)
> I don't get the obsession with removing dumb online stunts.
Let me help you with that: This stunt was done in order to get attention. You fuel it with attention and there will be more stunts. Either from this dude or others. You remove the attention and it dies out on its own.
I believe, and many others seems to agree this stunt was potentially dangerous and we should have less of these in the future. Removing the video is the way to achieve that, keeping the video up is youtube profiting from a potentially dangerous stunt.
> Appealing to protected groups is the weakest argument you could ever make for "Businesses can censor whoever they like".
>Youtube does not hold monopoly on communication or information.
What, pray tell, is that other service that has several hundred million of viewers and thousands of hours of video being uploaded every hour?
As soon as you tell me it's name, I'm going to concede that YouTube is not a monopoly.
>Where is the rage?
Are you implying you just call for censorship as a hobby without even feeling angry? that's even worse.
>You remove the attention and it dies out on its own
This is demonstrably false, the guy who made the video didn't have a trend to draw inspiration from, he thought up of a dumb idea completely on his own. Even IF (a very big if) your model of how social imitation works is reasonably accurate and taking down the video really prevents any further stunts of those type, other influencers will simply think up of new dumb stunts like this.
Let me stress, again, that the world is not a kindergarten and you are not it's caretaker. If people want to crash aircrafts to get internet points, that's completely an issue between them and the relevant authorities, those bureaucrats suck up an awful lot of tax money, let them work for it for once.
You don't get to decide for the hundreds of millions who watch YouTube what's acceptable and what's not. I and countless other people fund this shitty public record with the attention we give to countless 20-second ads, and I want every recorded moment to stay recorded, at least until they go out of business. You don't have the right to force me to respect what offends or worries you, don't worry about public safety, let everyone worry about their own.
Ad revenue varies widely. Somewhere between $1k/million views and $10k/million views is most common.
Don't forget that each view on a big video is a chance of a subscription by that user, which leads to more views on followup videos, more sharing, more chance of sponsorships, etc. So the total revenue earned by a 'hit' video is actually much larger than it appears.
This plane was going to be scrapped before he purchased it. There was also an odd modified fuel selector visible in the cockpit that is unlikely to be allowed on a non-experimental aircraft. Seemed obvious that this wasn't a plane he intended to use regularly.
It depends a lot on the genre. Some pay $3-5 CPM I believe (so, $3k-5k per million). And that's just the youtube ads; once a channel gets a lot of subscribers they can attract external sponsors as well.
There used to be a sponsoring segment in the beginning, but, if I recall correctly, they ended the contract after the stunt became known and it was cut.
Affiliate link, not a sponsor. It's a common ruse by YouTubers to refer to them as sponsors to suggest that there's a negotiated commercial relationship when there isn't.
He also jumped out of the plane holding a selfie stick. Call me old fashioned, but if I was bailing out of a crashing plane, that wouldn’t be the first thing I would reach for.
He probably will just be banned from flying for life, but will still have a much enlarged youtube audience and ad revenue that more than pays for the lost plane.
Under U.S. law, are there circumstances in which it could be acceptable to deliberately crash a plane?
In this case, it clearly wasn't (crashing on public lands with risk of starting a wildfire and polluting them), but if you wanted to crash a plane for a scene in a movie, could you do so? Maybe crashing on private property in a predetermined location with appropriate fire department support and prior notification to air traffic control about your intentions?
Can manufacturers perform genuine crashes (from controlled flight) on private property for safety tests, the way car manufacturers perform tests with crash test dummies?
So I'm guessing that outside of very specific scenarios, you would have a hard time getting permission to deliberately crash a plane anywhere in the US.
Yea, I doubt you actually need a specific permit to crash an aircraft in a controlled fashion rather than everything else like operating a huge drone etc. The issue is the YouTuber essentially abandoned control of the aircraft so it could have landed on anything.
I don’t see why not. The FAA didn’t say that his violation was that he intentionally crashed a plane.
> the F.A.A. said he had violated federal aviation regulations and operated his single-engine plane in a “careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.”
> The FAA didn’t say that his violation was that he intentionally crashed a plane.
the FAA did say he wore a parachute (unusual), opened the door before the engine quit, didn't follow procedure to attempt to restart the engine, and intentionally climbed out of the plane to film it rather than attempting to land it.
Intentionally crashing a plane seems a pretty good example of piloting in a careless/reckless manner that endangers life or property. There's not a specific rule "they shall not crash your plane" but this is more of a catch-all rule for these kind of situations.
There's a big difference between forbidding "crashing a plane" and forbidding "recklessly endangering people and property". The most obvious example being: there are circumstances in which crashing is unavoidable. Sully, for instance, crashed a plane in a way that protected life and property.
It is much more precise to just forbid "endangering people/property" than it is to try to enumerate every action that could be dangerous and then adding exceptions.
Are you suggesting that intentionally crashing a plane would not constitute operation in a “careless or reckless manner”? So as to endanger the life or property of another?
I could argue that there are cases where you could crash a plane in careful and not reckless manner. That is with extreme control, planning and probably minimising the potential damages such as environmental by removing as much hazardous stuff as possible. Plus having extensive planning on operation. Still unlikely to get approved, but I see it to be possible.
I think he's suggesting that the FAA regulation he violated was operating the plane in a careless or reckless manner. He did that by intentionally crashing his plane.
I am saying that the problem is that he was careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.
I am suggesting that a controlled crash where someone was not careless or reckless would probably not be a problem. Say for instance, in a controlled crash test by a manufacturer.
The FAR does generally make provisions for waivers of the regulations (e.g. 14 CFR 91.903-905 for GA, 14 CFR 107.205 for sUAS). Applications for waivers involve justifying your operation and convincing the FAA that you can conduct it safely. For something like that, they’d want it over a sparsely populated area or a restricted access area and with appropriate ground support for fire / medical. You’d also almost certainly have to file NOTAMs (maybe a TFR).
It's been done, not least for airliner safety testing - there's video out there of an old airliner (707 or 727, I want to say) being deliberately crashed by remote control into a set of spikes in order to observe the breakup.
I assume there's some permitting regime, and of course you'd need to find a place to do it, but probably nothing too onerous by the standard of being able to buy a whole airplane specifically to wreck it.
There probably isn't a specific permit or process for two primary reasons.
Firstly, crashing a plane intentionally is a rare thing and (until now, apparently) isn't the kind of thing the riff raff do so there's no reason to throw up barriers to keep the riff raff out nor enough volume requests to warrant a an institutional process for dishing out said denials.
Second, it is naive to expect a government agency to stick their neck out and accept some degree of liability for something like this (which is what approving a comprehensive plan would do). It's not like there's highly developed industry standards for plane crashing they can rely on.
The closest you'll get to a "permit" is probably the FAA knowing your intentions in advance and not objecting.
It's the times. And yeah, for all that it looks and sounds like this might have been relatively survivable with a quick evacuation, there's still a little horror in that cabin view.
Keep in mind that this guy isn't in trouble for crashing his plane per se, the FAA is on him for "careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another".
If you're something like a movie studio, you bring in the experts that help you plan a stunt to be done safely. Insured. Plan, plan plan. Also probably get permits, have fire fighters on standby, etc. Basically the exact opposite of "careless or reckless".
On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that act of crashing a plane isn’t illegal by itself and there isn’t a regulation that states you must get approval or coordinate with the FAA prior to a crash. But even if you manage to set things up so that you aren’t endangering the public, the moment you leave a flying plane unattended you have turned it into a UAV, and you almost certainly break the FAA’s rules on UAV operations. So if you’re going to crash a plane intentionally you have to ride it all the way to the ground :)
As with car testing, it is usually preferable, on engineering grounds, to perform the tests in a more controlled environment where the parameters can be tightly controlled and the outcomes exhaustively measured.
Here's a description of one such series of tests, and some video:
I’d imagine if they didn’t already have their own land to do this they could rent an old airfield or quarry and get assistance from the FBI like Mythbusters did back in the day to (potentially) blow things up
Somewhere there’s a form that allows you to crash a plane legally, I’d bet. Probably be a much longer form for a commercial plane though
Hell's Angels was released in 1930. The FAA didn't exist until 1958. The Civil Aeronautics Board, which preceded the FAA was formed in 1939. There was the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce [1] that existed between 1926 and 1934. Their handling of the 1931 Fokker F-10 [2] crash is what led to the creation of the NTSB as a separate agency. Presumably the DoC wasn't that interested in air crashes at the time. Probably understandable, considering the reliability of early aircraft.
There's not a rule against deliberately crashing a plane because it's not anticipated that anyone would. Of course there are a whole host of rules that would be inevitably violated by doing so in almost all circumstances.
That would, at best, get you a 709 ride (reexamination by the FAA to see if you really do qualify to hold your pilot certificate) or mandatory re-training. There is no universe in which the FAA would hear that and just say, "lol, totes, we get it man, planes are hard." Responding appropriately to an engine failure is a required skill for even the most basic pilot certificate and if you can't do it, you have no business flying an airplane.
Having had the forethought to wear a parachute and the steady nerves to use a selfie stick on the way down, among other things mentioned in the article, would complicate this defense.
A private pilot's license is a privilege, and being somewhat resistant to panic is one of the prerequisites of that privilege.
When you're in the air alone, there is no one to rely on but yourself, and failure to exercise proper judgment can kill people on the ground. So the FAA has broad leeway to determine that you don't have the right mindset for a private pilot's license.
I hate calling things like this a privilege. It's licensed and regulated for the safety and benefit of the people who fly and live underneath airspace (all of us).
There are too many things involving the government that have turned into privileges where it takes knowing someone or being able to afford access to obtain action.
Having the fortune of health/time/money is a privilege. Getting the license after meeting the requirements should automatically follow and not be at the whims of privilege.
I do get what you're saying, but there are people using "privilege not a right" literally to mean that someone gets to decide whether the person is worthy beyond some standard criteria.
Yup I see the distinction and I agree with you. It also means that you will loose that right for breaking any rules / regulations of that license; but the gray area I guess is the unwritten rules governing safety alongside written ones.
We’ll likely see amendments codifying those unwritten rules into existing legislation soon enough.
The FAA are not going to come down on you hard if you panic, but if you're dumb enough to make it clear that you're faking that panic for youtube views, they're going to throw every single book possible at you.
And I doubt this is the final action. FAA can't criminally prosecute but they can refer to the DOJ.
The NTSB doesn’t even travel to every GA fatal accident, let alone one reported as an old T-craft engine failure with no injuries (assuming the case where he didn’t post the video).
Of course, without the intent of posting the video, that plane doesn’t crash, so the NTSB doesn’t come looking then either.
You can say whatever you want, and many people who break the law do exactly that.
But in the end, evidence may show that you are not being truthful. For example, if the evidence demonstrates that you premeditated your actions, then nobody is going to believe that it was a split second mistake.
The funny thing is he would probably have gotten more views if he faked a loss of power but did everything right and put the plane down safely instead of bailing.
It would have been a more useful video for the subset of YouTube viewers that actually have/want private pilot licences, but "I crashed" as a headline is bound to generate more clicks than "I nearly crashed". Not least because people familiar with YouTube clickbait titling know the latter is quite likely to show a plane taxiing past another plane, or there being two planes within sight distance of each other in the air...
During covid there was a super viral video on Facebook of a commercial pilot saving the plane from crashing while landing in extremely windy conditions. Did over 100 million views IIRC. People love a happy ending
This is what I thought at the time. It just goes to show that guys like this project their own stupidity onto their audiences (this is not always an unsuccessful strategy)
I couldn't actually see anybody taking that line? There's a lot of quibbling about whether individual details like hiking to the wreckage indicate that it's fake or not, but there's also a pretty consistent view that there's a whole lot of red flags and the sum total is suspicious as hell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29742283 - "I'm impressed how quickly folks here are able to arrive at the most certain conclusion that this was staged! While that explanation seems possible (and not unlikely), I keep coming back to Hanlon's Razor"
Oh good. As a PPL working on an instrument rating this gladdens my heart. The aviation community isn’t just pilots. Many folks contribute to safety including ATC, first responders, SAR, aerospace engineers, investigators and many more. If you’d like a sense of how invested some of these people are in flight safety, listen to ATC recordings of incidents where you can hear back chatter between control facilities.
This guys actions show a lack of appreciation for the work these people do and the care they put into that work.
There’s also the risk of forest fire.
I think the cherry on top would be if the USFS got him for littering.
There are very, very few things that get my goat like a willfully irresponsible pilot. What really bothers me though are the CFIs who keep signing these guys' flight reviews. I trained pilots for years and it is in-your-face, flashing-neon-sign obvious when someone like this walks through the door.
As someone barely qualified for MS FlightSim I think it's amazing how so many people, on the OG thread on HN and the Reddit ones I saw could point out things that made the whole scenario look odd. Pointing out little things that just made sense after it was laid out.
Terrible but educational. And also neat that so many "amateurs" could see the same flaws.
There's really interesting observations made by the YouTube community - he had a fire extinguisher concealed under his pants right above his ankle.
Great that he got his pilots license revoked. He obviously is not mature enough.