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Comment by chrononaut | Hacker News Reader

> 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:

- Bulge on his right calf when jumping out of the plane at 2m06s into the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbYszLNZxhM&t=126s

- You can then see the bottom of the fire extinguisher on his left leg lit up by the sun for a couple frames at 2m11s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbYszLNZxhM&t=131s

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What was the purpose of the fire extinguishers? To put out the plane after it crashed?

All I can think is the extra weight on his legs my break his tib/fib, which would not be good.

It would have made for a more gripping video: some real drama for once, with some real rather than badly-acted tension.

That's anyones guess.

I doubt that by the time he got too the plane there would have been anything left worth extinguishing?

Perhaps too prevent a forest fire? Although that would've been equally futile.

Maybe someone who intentionally crashes a plan for a few YouTube clicks isn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier after all.

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.

Those must be some fire extinguishers if he could use just two of them to put out fires spanning "miles of trees, homes, and people"!

Every fire starts small. And besides, the guy has already demonstrated that he lacks critical thinking skills.

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.

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.

He is a fairly skilled parachutist and was wearing a skydiving rig. He also knew where he was putting his plane down.

So he might have got to it.

But on the other hand he's also an idiot.

Nevertheless he at least thought he might have to do this.

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.

> I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.

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.

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.

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!".

There are hundreds if not thousands of big forest fires across the earth. How many of them started with a plane crash? None.

Number of planes deliberately crashed into a forest known to be prone to forest fires? Also probably none. There's always a first time though.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/20/flatt-fire-is-largest...

To get to the gopros if the plane was on fire.

An extinguisher that small is basically useless except for very temporarily beating back the fire to get to something/someone.

That seems like the best explanation. After all the whole jump was futile if he didn't recover the footage.

Possibly not fire extinguishers. They might be smoke canisters, used for a nice visual effect by sky divers.

I would guess that people who goes skydiving usually don't go up in the plane alone...

Looks like water bottles if you ask me, which would be a necessity in that area.

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.

An empty tank is a more dangerous tank. An empty tank is full of vapor, which is the bit that explodes, not liquid.

But after that, there is no more gasoline left for burning.

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.

On the other hand, TWA 800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

> ...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.

You can also see the bottom of the one on his right leg for a few frames when he changes the camera from his right to his left hand at 2:15:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbYszLNZxhM&t=135s

Might be some water bottles.

You have absolutely amazing eyes.

You can frame-by-frame on YT by pressing '.', but yes, still an amazing catch by parent

And ',' to go back a frame, for those that didn't know.

mpv controls!

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.)

Even though those are the correct controls I tend to think of the < and > as the mnemonics because it makes kind of sense (but those are shift)

And < and > increase and decrease playback speed, for what that's worth

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 :-)

That's why they are the keys in fact. Those are the usual shortcuts for frame navigation in some video editors.

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.

>You have absolutely amazing eyes.

blushes thanks

It was probably more the attention to detail and dataprocessing and recognition loop.

You have an amazing brain just doesn't really tickle all the same physiological switches though.

Some of that processing attributed to the brain happens in the eyes themselves, so "amazing eyes" still fits :-)

If someone called my brain amazing I'd blush :)

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.

And some of us don't even speak or write English as a first language, imagine!

If the op felt I was flirting with them then that's entirely their problem :)

It wasn't the OP who replied

> "you have excellent eyes"

"good eyes" or "well spotted" would be more idiomatic, I think.

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.

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