> 1. How experienced a pilot is this man? Is he a very junior novice or experienced such that this should be a non-factor.

Shouldn't matter. By the time the FAA examiner gives you a pilot's license, they should be convinced that you can safely handle aviation, to include engine failures.

But unless the airplane is literally coming apart around you, bailing out of a light airplane is almost always the wrong answer. They land fairly slow, especially an old T-craft, and it doesn't take very many feet of deceleration room for it to be something you walk away from.

I'm not familiar with the particular accident and circumstances, but nothing I've seen in the avweb writeup makes it look very good. And I generally suspect YouTube "pilots" are mostly in it for the views, and nothing sells views like a crash.

As far as "the engine has quit" stress, as long as the rest of the airplane is in good shape, it's still a perfectly good airplane. And pilots regularly train (at least, should...) for engine out landings. It's a common event in training - you get somewhere near the airport, the instructor pulls the throttle back and says, "Your engine quit." I hate to say it's not a big deal, because if it quits for real, you'll certainly be sweating, but a general aviation airplane doesn't fall out of the sky if the engine quits.

>> you get somewhere near the airport, the instructor pulls the throttle back and says, "Your engine quit."

The first time mine did this was on downwind in the pattern. I looked forward at lots of farmland and said "how about there?" He pointed left and said "you got a perfectly good runway over there." I said "oh you really want me to do this, I better make my turn." IIRC I made the landing but not really near the numbers :-)

If it quits for real, you do NOT know you are sweating until you land. At least not in my two. For me, it felt like time slowed down and everything was crystal clear, like a yellow brick road appeared in my vision. OTOH, I fly a twin...

Not everyone reacts the same to crisis though. I can imagine other people totally freaking out and not having razor focus like you. And your don't really know what type of person you are until you're in it.

But it's sure a great thing to have!

No need to sweat. Just carry a skydiving parachute.

1: A lot of failures could be attributed to someone forgetting their training due to stress... but he didn't seem under that much stress and evidently forgot all of his training. That's pretty suspect. You shouldn't be able to get a certificate without showing that slow to best glide, start looking for a landing site, and start the engine out checklist is a set of steps that you can conduct quickly from memory. It should be trained into pilots to do this kind of thing out loud (e.g. pointing and narrating) because the instructor and examiner want to see it that way and it just helps you keep on track and concentrating. That makes it odd that, if any of this happened, he omitted it from the video... from a vanity perspective it's an opportunity to Look Like A Real Pilot by working your list in an authoritative voice (I'm pretty sure every pilot gets a kick out of saying Landing Assured, otherwise they haven't found out how fun it is yet).

Of course we can't totally tell from the video but it really doesn't seem like he took any of these actions prior to bailing out, certainly we don't see him with a checklist. Bailing out isn't even really something that's discussed as an option in an engine-out scenario, it would have to be such an unusual situation for it to be the best choice and it will tend to endanger anyone/anything on the ground (and of course it's a goal of aviation not to do that). One thing that is explicitly trained for any kind of precautionary (e.g. "this might go poorly") landing is opening the door, because in the past doors have jammed in the frame and prevented the pilot escaping a fire. That's why a lot of people are calling it out as suspect that he has his door open a bit from the very start... like he already worked some kind of precautionary landing checklist. Forward-hinged doors are also hard to open in flight because of the air pressure on them (that's kind of a feature), so one also wonders if he had tested to make sure he could get it open enough to fall out.

It's hard to believe that someone with a certificate wouldn't at least promptly fumble for the checklist, and I bet inexperienced pilots would probably be inclined to make a radio call earlier than experienced ones did since it takes some discipline to keep your priorities on aviate, navigate, communicate when things go wrong. Yet we never see him make a radio call at all, which is very odd since he expresses concern about having a way out of the mountains... I personally suspect that he knew that a mayday call would probably result in a fire brigade or sheriff's deputies or state police helicopter or whatever showing up before he had much time to address the crash site (controllers activate local fire and search and rescue as a precaution when they hear a plane might go down in the wilderness and it didn't look like he was that far from civilization). That could easily lead to questions and discovery of evidence that would become a problem for him later, so I think it was an intentional decision to avoid having authorities notified in real-time. This is a cynical take obviously but it feels like he was preserving his ability to tamper with the incident site before anyone showed up who would know to preserve it for investigators.

2: I mean it's hard to say about some random airplane, obviously it's a very old aircraft but most of the critical parts will have been outright replaced much more recently than it was made. The FAA has requirements to keep an aircraft in use and they involve regular inspections and preventative maintenance, so older planes don't tend to fall out of the sky just because they're old. There are ways to skirt these rules but not a lot of them, and if it's found that he did (or the owner did or whatever) he will really get the book thrown at him just on that front. For the most part if an airplane is still registered to fly it's in as good of mechanical condition as any other plane, although sometimes older aircraft will get relegated to basically experimental status because of missing safety features (which puts in place restrictions like not flying over cities). The Taylorcraft he was in is certified as a standard aircraft though, nothing weird going on, except that I think it might fall into the grandfather sport pilot rules that allow certain standard aircraft to be called "light sport" if they meet the requirements but were certified as standard because the light sport class didn't exist yet at the time. That raises the question of whether Jacob had a sport pilot license or not since that program gets some criticism from a safety front, but from searching the airman registry it looks like he has a regular private certificate issued about a year and a half ago, on a third-class medical from 2018 which suggests maybe he started and stopped training but isn't super unusual.

Also what YouTuber in their right mind leaves the part where they say "mayday mayday mayday" out of the video. It's just like the movies! If we believe that he worked the steps and just edited them out, it's a really bizarre creative decision for him to make. Hard for me to believe.

> Also what YouTuber in their right mind leaves the part where they say "mayday mayday mayday" out of the video. It's just like the movies! If we believe that he worked the steps and just edited them out, it's a really bizarre creative decision for him to make. Hard for me to believe.

That is also weird if the whole thing is staged. So it's not really evidence for or against.

> 1. How experienced a pilot is this man? Is he a very junior novice or experienced such that this should be a non-factor.

he has a pilot license and that is enough experience to get out of this without bailing on the plane. the fact that he had a full proper skydiving rig was a red flag.

> 2. I see lots of folks mentioned hardwares in the comments - would a vintage craft (80+ years) be lacking good maintenance or equipment?

every plane has to undergo some form of periodic maintenance and 80 year old planes are worthy if kept up. it's a single engine plane though and those do fail from time to time, however they do have practice in engine failures as part of the path to getting the pilot license. these things can glide for a long long way and he had a lot of altitude to find a place to land such as a road or dirt. this was imo a stunt for his youtube page.

For foreigners like me that are not so initialism-savvy, "BOTD" stands for "Benefit of the Doubt".

The giveaway for me is the camera mounted to his wrist. Why would you have that on the wrist, it makes no sense if the flight had gone "as planned".

I guess the question to what is, is this featured in other videos of his? If not, very bad look.

Thanks to Ridge Wallet being the sponsor.

Don't forget that.

N29508 if anyone is interested.

NTSB investigation number - WPR22LA049

Yeah, and does he wear a full, regular skydiving rig (not an emergency backup rig) while flying airplanes in his other videos?

I have not watched them, but commenters in the original article have said that he does not wear skydiving rigs while flying other airplanes. (I haven't watched his other videos and can't personally confirm or deny)

not even mounted on the wrist. If you watch the video he switches hands, so its on a selfie stick.

Dude bailed out in an 'emergency' but remembered to grab his selfie stick and press record.

If you have a pilot's license, which this man did, then you have been extensively trained on these things. Getting a pilot's license is not easy.

As someone who has also been training for his own pilot's license, and has practiced engine-out situations while flying, his reactions look suspect. First of all, he has considerable altitude and could likely fly to a safe forced landing location. Second, he doesn't bank at all to provide better visibility into landing options. Third, we don't see him trying to restart the engine at all.

(Unless this airplane is somehow so old that it doesn't have one) – all airplanes come with a quick reaction checklist which you keep right next at you, and are ready to pull out at a moment's notice. It provides instructions on exactly what to do in situations like an engine failure. From what I can see, I don't see him attempting to recover the engine. It would be poor airmanship to bail from the aircraft without at least running through the engine failure checklist.

I'll let the FAA do their job before drawing any final conclusions but my impression as a student pilot is that this was planned and staged.

Most light aircraft like the kind that he's flying have a glide slope of something like 1:6 with no power: meaning that you can travel quite a long distance with the altitude that he has in the video.

Lastly, I will remark on comments made in the article itself. He is not wearing an emergency bail-out skydiving rig. He is wearing a full, redundant skydiving rig (the kind that come with two parachutes). This is highly unusual as full skydiving rigs are bulky and would be uncomfortable to wear in the cockpit of an airplane. Emergency bail-out rigs are considerably thinner since they are meant as actual backup systems.

The guy's focus looking out the door, rather than focusing on flying the plane and looking for a landing spot (he has tons of altitude and potential to get to plenty of viably safe ones), gives me the impression that he's already made the decision to skydive out of the plane.

Someone may have radio recordings. If we know the tail number of the aircraft (people were working it out in the article comments) then it may be possible to find the radar tracks showing the craft's last known location. If Internet sleuths want to dig in, then you can from there find the radio frequency that he'd be expected to be on, and if he's even attempting to make this seem like a real accident you'd hear him declare an emergency on the radio. Furthermore, if Air Traffic Control had a radar track on him, then they may have been able to guide him to a safe landing location given his altitude and knowledge of the aircraft's "best glide".

To me it's highly suspicious that he's not showing any of the video angle of the cockpit interior, including what he should be/is doing to recover the aircraft and look for safe forced landing sites.

All of this.

My dad had a PPL (uk single engine pilots license). The checklist was on the dash, it was easy to understand.

Even though I haven't flown with him since I was ten, I still vaguely remember what things you should generally do:

1) adjust trim for best glide

2) attempt restarts

3) find the best landing site, go to 2

Registration is N29508