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intunderflow

The article says the FAA can't charge him with a crime, only remove his license

If the FAA can't charge him, who is responsible for that? The local district attorney where he crashed?

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I'd imagine a US attorney. Don't airspace crimes usually fall under federal jurisdiction?

Here's a fancy-looking felony that seems on point:

- "18 U.S. Code § 32 - Destruction of aircraft or aircraft facilities"

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/32

That's for tampering with aircraft "used, operated, or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce", which seems unlikely for a private GA plane, even if you stretch the definition of "interstate commerce" like courts like to do. Plus the section is really about other people's planes, not ones you own, otherwise anybody performing maintenance work "disabling" a plane just committed a felony.

> That's for tampering with aircraft "used, operated, or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce"

Is that not an OR requirement of paragraph (1), meaning that "sets fire to, damages, destroys, disables, or wrecks any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States" would be sufficient on its own? That was my initial reading of the paragraph, but I'm not hugely familiar with US law.

"Special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States" seems to be defined here:

> “special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States” includes any of the following aircraft in flight: (A) a civil aircraft of the United States. (B) an aircraft of the armed forces of the United States. (C) another aircraft in the United States.[...]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/46501#2

I think the US Attorneys' Manual agrees with your reading:

- "Jurisdiction over acts relating to the destruction of aircraft or aircraft facilities extends to "any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States."

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

There's probably a less specific crime he could be charged with. Even the FAA reg he violated—"careless and reckless operation"—is a catch-all the FAA uses to say, "we don't have a specific rule against what you did, but you were definitely being a dumbass on purpose."

There's also a nicely general Fraud charge [1] 18 U.S. Code § 1341 - Frauds and swindles

There was deceit, and it's probably a reasonable presumption that he did it to enrich himself via media attention & monetized content.

I'm sure there's plenty of statutes that could apply here.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1341

The United States Attorney is the folks that actually prosecute federal crimes. They decide to bring criminal charges.

https://www.justice.gov/usao

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-27000-principles-federal-pro...

Old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16586965

If he made a claim against his insurance they might nail him for insurance fraud, with the FAA report to back up the claim that would have a pretty high chance of sticking.

Is he allowed to not make a claim? Unless the plane was purchased outright, the bank will want to make a claim.

>Unless the plane was purchased outright,

It may very well have been. Used GA planes aren't cheap but they aren't thaaaat expensive.

>the bank will want to make a claim.

It would take a very foolish bank to write a loan on a plane (or boat) that is secured by said object. It's probably secured by something else and even if it's not they probably won't care as long as the payments keep coming. Remember, they're money dealers, not plane dealers. They'd rather have the money.

He is pretty well off. We can be quite certain that he bought the plane with cash.

Lots of well off people still purchase things via loans. Also various net worth estimations online place him between $1M to $1.5M. That's not the kind of money where you automatically just pay cash for something that might be $50k to $100K, especially when net worth at that level is often (not always) tied up in a primary residence. There's no certainty here. And regardless, insurance is required on private aircraft, owned or loaned.

> It would take a very foolish bank to write a loan on a plane (or boat) that is secured by said object.

What now? Air Fleet Capital and AOPA Finance will both happily do this. It is quite typical, just like buying a car...

No more than you're allowed to claim insurance after setting fire to your property.

but he will claim that he didn't start the fire.

How exactly are you going to verify that unless the plane has some blackbox?

Given that he nicely put it all on video...

I’d normally say you get to pick one - make the video OR make the insurance claim, but given how stupid this pilot was I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to get both (and arguably NOT trying to claim the insurance itself might look suspicious)

Him making a false claim would be insurance fraud, but if it's bought on a loan and there's an insurance policy favoring the bank, then the bank definitely can and will make a claim - it's just that the insurance company will then attempt to recover the money from this pilot since he's at fault, and is likely to succeed.

"likely to succeed" if the individual has the money for them to get... they may succeed in getting a judgement otherwise, but if the individual doesn't have the money, they likely won't get it.

But if the individual lied to the insurance company about having deliberately caused the crash, it is still probably insurance fraud, whether or not the individual was the one filing the claim, and can be prosecuted as such.

The weird thing is, when I looked into this, I learned that the plane he crashed didn't appear to be his plane. In all his other videos he is piloting a different plane and the plane he crashed wasn't registered to him, it was registered to someone named "Laura Smith."

Edit: I just watched another video which claimed that he purchased the plane about a month before the crash, but didn't complete the registration until after the video came out (which was another month after that). Still suspicious.

Are you oppressing his right to identify as Laura Smith?!

I don't think that we can assume that even if submitted on the day of purchase, that a change of registration would be processed immediately.

There's evidence that he purchased an old plane with lots of problems explicitly for this stunt.

The state or whomever should charge him for littering.

Though I imagine they'll probably get him for insurance fraud.

I would have thought there would be a felony for intentionally crashing an aircraft

There would have to be harm...I mean I think so. Like if he made sure nobody got hurt? No damage, no risk?

"Reckless endangerment" doesn't necessarily have to have harm done to be a crime.

The pilot could not have known with 100% certainty that the plane wouldn't land on a hiker or wildlife.

Oh that makes sense.

And it's an airplane, the ultimate sword of Damocles hanging over people's heads by a horse hair, yeah this was like a fucking kamikaze.

And like the other commenters say, there are means to do aircraft destructions properly, with permission and so forth, meaning in that case with 0% chance of killing living things and therefore no felony.

If he stayed with the plane all the way to the ground in control he could make that argument. The minute he relenquished control of the plane, there was risk it would go somewhere he didn't expect.

Why would you need to make that criminal? It's already a crime to do something criminal like hurting someone else whether it's with a plane, a car, or a knife.

Because it's reckless to crash a plane. You can kill people on the ground.

There are a million specific reckless things you can do that are as bad or worse.

They're not specifically illegal.

And they're likely to remain that way unless someone manages to do one of them and dodge all other criminal prosecution.

Its his-ish property. The FAA got him for the flying equivalent of reckless driving, but its not a felony to crash your car.

Its just expensive as hell, and the knock on fines will only add onto it.

The felony will be under reckless endangerment or some other statute for people who intentionally do criminally stupid things that could or have caused serious harm/damage.

You’re not getting off on some technicality where there is no specific law against a specific action. There are broad statutes to specifically nail people who think like that.

Edit: There is a lovely idiom for this—“play stupid games, win stupid prizes”.

I think he crashed in the middle of an unpopulated desert-ish area. I'm not sure what's the criteria is for reckless endangerment though, and maybe the intent matters more than the end result.

I don’t think it matters where the plane crashed if he wasn’t in control of it.

Los Padres National Forest isn’t the Mojave Desert.

> National Forest

Yikes, a federal property no less.

It’s actually quite large and has a number of planes that went down in it in actual accidents - knew of at least one.

If you look at a map of the area, he ditched the plane in the exact place you'd pick if you were trying to stay away from large groups of people. That's one of the many aspects that suggest this was an intentional crash.

Honestly, that's the part of the story that I find most interesting. Private planes are not exactly free.

This guy has some bumping around money if he was willing to sacrifice a plane for a YouTube stunt.

Depending on how crappy you want to go you can get one for $30k maybe, and I don’t know the monetization rates for YouTube but if you hit 10 million you might make that back.

Did he even own the plane? Or did he rent it?

The plane is (was?) registered in his name:

https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

Is it a felony to crash your car on purpose in a situation that could be dangerous to the public?

You'll need to hit something to crash your car. Depending on your target, the $ value could push you into felony territory.

Side note: Trees are much more expensive to replace than you might assume.

>The state or whomever should charge him for littering.

TFA says he recovered the wreckage and disposed of it

He littered and left his litter there for several days.

He should be very glad that it didn't cause a forest fire. Reckless burning can be a 2-3 year felony in California.

If what he did is somehow linked to attempting to start a fire in federal land, arson or w/e (which I don't think is a hard thing to argue), he's in BIG trouble.

If one or two people come out later and state they were hiking around the area when/where this happened, he's in BIG trouble.

Also, this is a wild speculation, but I'm sure 9/11 put in place a lot of dos and don'ts regarding aircraft and their use linked to terrorism. I mean, I don't think he was a terrorist, but if the local jurisdiction finds a way to make it look that way ... he's in BIG trouble, again.

I know this is a bit exaggerated, but I think they're going to throw everything they can at him, to make an example out of this sort of thing and prevent others in the future from attempting these idiotic "stunts".

From the article, it sounds like they can't even remove his license - they can only ask for it back and fine him for every days that he doesn't voluntarily return it.

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