Social Media Flying High... and Crashing.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating YouTuber Trevor Jacob for allegedly staging an aircraft accident in November. Jacob, the former Olympic snowboarder turned YouTuber, was flying solo over the Los Padres National Forest north of Los Angeles on November 24, when the engine on the Taylorcraft BL-65 allegedly quit. Jacob, a private pilot, was wearing a sport parachute and bailed out of the aircraft. The pilotless airplane crashed as Jacob floated to earth.

At the time of the event, Jacob was allegedly enroute from Lompoc City Airport (KLPC) in Santa Barbara County to Mammoth Lakes (KMMH) in order to snowboard. He had recently purchased the aircraft and according to several reports in local newspapers, there is some question as to whether the aircraft was airworthy at the time of the flight, as it needed maintenance. The aircraft had several cameras mounted on it and in it. The video shows Jacob's reaction to loss of engine power. Although there is a camera mounted inside the cockpit that faces the panel, there are no shots of the panel that show the position of the throttle or mixture knobs, or the position of the magneto switch at the time of the power loss or after. The video shows the aircraft cockpit as viewed from the left wing and from the tail of the aircraft, and inside the cockpit Jacob has a handheld camera which is mounted on a selfie stick before he bails out. As he falls away from the aircraft, he keeps the camera pointed on his face. The video was posted to YouTube on December 23, and since then it has been shared and copied numerous times. There have been over a million views of the video on YouTube alone. Jacob's other YouTube videos of his athletic activities garner on average a few thousand hits a day. 

The video has been heavily scrutinized. For example, it has been noted that there was a flat, open area in the distance. Ostensibly, Jacob could have attempted an emergency landing in that area instead of jumping from the aircraft. Other things noticed in the video are what appears to be a significant amount of fuel in the header tank of the aircraft, as shown by the tube fuel gauge atop the cowling, and a freeze frame of Jacob's separation from the aircraft shows a cylindrical object strapped to his left calf (under his pant leg) that has the same dimensions as a fire extinguisher. A fire extinguisher is usually not carried as part of a pilot's personal equipment.

After the event, as he hikes out of the brush, Jacob talks about the benefit of wearing a parachute, stating that he always wears one when he flies. However a search of his other flying videos shows this statement to be incorrect.  The wreckage of the aircraft was allegedly recovered by Jacob a few days after he reported the accident to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FAA.  The NTSB normally does not investigate unscheduled, off-airport landings of vintage light aircraft unless there is a failure of a flight-control system, damage to something other than the aircraft in excess of $25,000, or serious injuries as the result of the accident. However, the NTSB has filed a preliminary report.  Jacob sustained minor injuries in the form of a few cuts and bruises from landing in the brush. If the FAA concludes that the accident was intentional and therefore staged, Jacob could be cited for violation of FAR 91.13: careless and reckless operation of aircraft. If it is determined that the aircraft was unairworthy at the time of the flight and there was no ferry permit, more citations could follow.

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@ElonJet is one of 15 flight-tracking accounts 19 year old Jack Sweeney has created, run by bots he's programmed to parse the data and tweet every time a chosen plane takes off or lands. Each one follows a high-profile person, almost all in tech, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But Musk's tracker is the most popular, with nearly 83,000 followers. The account's popularity appears to have scared Musk. "I don't love the idea of being shot by a nutcase," he told Sweeney in their DM conversation. The conversation continued for a few more messages. Musk asked Sweeney how much he made off the Twitter accounts, which Sweeney said was no more than $20 a month. Then Elon Musk made his own offer: $5,000 to delete the account and help the billionaire keep "crazy people" from tracking his location. Sweeney told Musk to add another 0. "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3." Musk said he'd think about it. But so far, he hasn't paid Sweeney a dime, and the account is still running. Sweeney says he's okay with getting ghosted. He has benefited a lot from @ElonJet and the other accounts, he said: he's gained social media followers, learned how to code, and even scored a part time job at UberJets as an application developer. Better yet, the self-described Elon Musk "fan" got to have a conversation with a man he's looked up to for years.

Though the Twitter accounts have not led to any dangerous incidents so far, at least according to Sweeney's knowledge and information available online, Musk does have a point. Celebrities getting ambushed at airports - by fans, by people who want to sell their autograph, paparazzi, stalkers, and the like - is certainly a thing. And Musk and other tech CEOs have become bona fide celebrities in recent years. But Twitter bots don't get starstruck. They've just gone on parsing the data Sweeney's told them to. The 15 bots use FAA information when available; the administration keeps track of when and where planes depart and land, as well as their intended path. However, Musk's plane and many others are on the LADD block list, which removes identifying information from the data.

Even blocked planes aren't truly private, though. In these cases, Sweeney uses data from the ADS-B transponders present on most aircraft which show a plane's location in the air in real time as charted on the ADS-B Exchange. Parsing this information is like a logic puzzle: Sweeney's bots can use a plane's altitude, combined with how long ago the data was received, to determine when it is taking off or landing. They can then cross-reference latitude and longitude with a database of airports to determine where the plane is leaving or headed. And though Sweeney's bots cannot pull from blocked FAA data to figure out where a plane plans to go, they can cross-reference the real-time ADS-B data with another website that posts anonymized versions of the FAA flight plans. This allows the bot to match the plane it is tracking in real time to the anonymized FAA flight plans and determine each plane's intended destination. This information is all entirely public, and can be used to track most private aircraft.

It's a loophole in high-profile security that has only flown under the radar because one needs a lot of industry-specific knowledge to know all this data was available and public, and to understand how to parse it. Sweeney had that context: his father works in the airline industry, and Sweeney has been tracking planes since he was a child. Like many young boys, he says he would try to identify types of planes as they flew across the sky, often checking his guesses against what he could find in online flight tracker apps. Once Sweeney explained to Musk where he was finding the data, the entrepreneur was surprised by how accessible it all was. "Air traffic control is so primitive," he said. The most recent DM Musk and Sweeney exchanged was last Wednesday, when Sweeney said he would prefer an internship over payment in return for deleting the account. Musk hasn't opened the message, Sweeney says, but he isn't offended. In fact, he thinks he knows why Musk went silent: "I think he's on vacay in Hawaii if you check ElonJet."